Just read around 20 pages of Max Planck's the New Science, chapter 2 of "Where is Science Going" called "Is the External World Real?" It was a fascinating description of logical positivism, basically saying that the positivists do not understand how the works of Faraday and electromagnetism are possible from a positivistic view, seems to imply this and does not elaborate so I don't know why Faraday is not understandable from a purely sensory abstraction point of view. But that is what Planck is trying to say, is that the world breaks down at a quantum level, so the idea that there's just a non contradictory list of facts about the world, which excludes all aesthetic or ethical conclusions, is based on the idea that the external world is simply unknowable. We can make statements about it, but these statements as raw scientific data do not lead to new discoveries. Planck lays a logical contradiction in logical positivist thought out at the end of chapter, which is very clear and does not require background knowledge to understand - it's a contradiction to say that there's both an external world which is real, and an external world which is unknowable. How do you know it's real if it's unknowable is Planck's proposition.
Planck was anti fascist, in a way which he believed was the best he could do. He privately hated Hitler and the Nazis, but he kept his post because he believed it was good to uphold the law, according the introduction. Planck is still the sort of author who seems to separate facts from values, thinks there is a definite external world which has laws "independent" of the instruments of science as he describes, which is why the instruments cannot always be trusted. But he does not believe that ethics plays no role in what we do, he derides the positivists for their view that ethics and aesthetic conclusions are not part of the conclusions of scientific study. He goes through a brief history of modern science in the beginning which is nice if you already know a lot of the stuff like the Michaelson Morley experiment and the workings of Relativity. It's a crash course kind of thing, but when he gets more into the meat of the book later it becomes a real treat to listen to some of his descriptions of positivist, and hearing about the whole history of modern science in brief is not bad, it gives you an idea of some of the names which are worth having in your library, like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr (Bohr I don't have), etc. And Planck doesn't use any logical notation to describe what he has to say, which I think is a mark of someone who understands what they say well enough to explain it simply.