Logical positivism
His second phase of thought began in the late forties and early fifties of the twenties century. Dr. Mahmoud was exposed during his study in England to the analytic philosophy and was greatly influenced by the thought of Bertrand Russell and attended a lecture for Alfred Ayer about 'Logical Positivism.  This constituted a form of preparation for his second phase in which he strictly adopted the principles of the new philosophical school of 'Logical Positivism'. Logical positivism rejected philosophy in its metaphysical sense and rendered it to the status of the analysis of scientific knowledge and analysis of meanings of the regular language. This period extended to somewhere between 1960 after writing the Artist East and 1968 when he left to teach in Kuwait. Landmarks of this period are his books: On Positivist Logic (1951), The Philosophy of Science (1952), The Myth of Metaphysics (1953) and The Theory of Knowledge (1956).