Born in Vienna, where he was assistant of the neopositivist philosopher Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna (1929-1936), Friedrich Waisman was one of the original members of the Vienna circle.
He left for the UK, where he lectured in Cambridge (1937-1939), and than moved to Oxford, where he taught Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy of Science. His philosophic ideas were in the beginning a very orthodox version of logical positivism, but later on and under the influence of Witgenstein he changed radically. During his early work, he emphasised formalism and later his thoughts were a type of extreme informalism. He tried to make philosophy more acceptable and easy to understand for his readers. In his work How I see Philosophy in Contemporary British Philosophy (1956), he claimed that philosophy is “very unlike science in that in philosophy there are no proofs, no theorems and no questions that can be decided”.