Karl Popper

Karl Raimond Popper
Sir Karl Popper c. 1980s
Full name	Karl Raimond Popper
Born	28 July 1902 Vienna, Austria
Died	17 September 1994(1994-09-17) (aged 92) London, England
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
Main interests	Epistemology Philosophy of science Social and political philosophy
Notable ideas	Falsifiability Hypothetico-deductive method Open society
Influenced by Socrates (via Plato) · Aristotle Kant · Schopenhauer · Hegel Einstein · Kierkegaard · Wittgenstein Vienna Circle · Tarski · Selz Russell · Campbell · Burke
Influenced Virtually all philosophy of science since 1930s · Hayek · Friedman Lakatos · Feyerabend · Soros Miller · Agassi · Bartley · Gombrich Jarvie · Levinson · Schmidt · Munz Magee · Lorenz · Shearmur Medawar · Dimitrakos · Albert · Gellner · Soroush

Sir Karl Popper CH FRS FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics.

He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century. He also wrote on social and political philosophy, especially the evils of totalitarian ideas and politics. Popper is known for the idea of empirical falsification.

Life

Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to middle-class parents of Jewish origins, both of whom had converted to Christianity. Popper received a Lutheran upbringing and was educated at the University of Vienna. His father had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library.

In 1919, he became attracted to Marxism. He joined the Association of Socialist School Students and also became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology. He soon stopped believing in Marxism, and was a supporter of social liberalism for the rest of his life.

Falsification

Popper, brought up in Vienna, was well aware of the Vienna Circle. That school of logical positivism, led by Moritz Schlick, defined knowledge (especially scientific knowledge) as being propositions which could be verified. Popper thought this was quite wrong. In his opinion, science grew indirectly, by wrong ideas being falsified. This he worked up in great detail in a series of books, of which The logic of scientific discovery is the most famous. All philosophy of science since then has had to deal with this issue, the criterion. By 'criterion' is meant: what is it that makes a theory truly scientific, as opposed to simply common sense or opinion?

The open society

Popper's work on political philosophy is also of great importance. Marx claimed knowledge of an historical process, where societies evolved from one state to another, until they reached a final state. This type of thought is known as 'historicism'. Popper argued that the growth of human knowledge partly causes the evolution of human history. Since "no society can predict its own future states of knowledge", it follows that no science can predict human history.

Popper's great works in defence of the liberal society were The open society and its enemies and The poverty of historicism. His allies in this struggle were Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman.

The paradox of tolerance

Although Popper was an advocate of toleration, he thought intolerance should not be tolerated. If tolerance allowed intolerance to succeed completely, tolerance itself would be threatened. In The open society and its enemies: The spell of Plato, he argued that:

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them".

Key works

• The logic of scientific discovery, 1934 (as Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959),

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  ISBN 0-415-27844-9
• The poverty of historicism, 1936 (private reading at a meeting in Brussels, 1944/45 as a series of journal articles in Econometrica, 1957 as a book),

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  ISBN 0-415-06569-0
• The open society and its enemies, 1945 Vol 1 The spell of Plato.

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  ISBN 0-415-29063-5, Vol 2 The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the aftermath.

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  ISBN 0-415-29063-5
• Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge, 1963,

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  ISBN 0-415-04318-2
• Objective knowledge: an evolutionary approach, 1972, Rev. ed., 1979,

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  ISBN 0-19-875024-2
• Unended quest; an intellectual autobiography, 1976,

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  ISBN 0-415-28590-9
• After the Open Society, 2008. Edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner, this volume contains a large number of Popper's previously unpublished or uncollected writings on political and social themes.

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  ISBN 978-0-415-30908-0

Related pages

• Liberalism

Other websites

• Discussion of Popper's Life and Work from Philosophy Talk Radio Program
• Karl Popper from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Karl Popper Web
• Karl Popper Institute includes complete bibliography 1925-1999
• Sir Karl Popper Society International Association for the Promotion of Science and Research, in German
• Influence on Friesian Philosophy
• Open Society Institute George Soros foundations network
• "A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper" by Martin Gardner
• "A Sceptical Look at 'A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper'" by J C Lester.
• Sir Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations
• Information on Lakatos/Popper Site maintained by John Kadvany, PhD.
• Discovering Karl Popper by Peter Singer The New York Review of Books, vol. 21, no. 7 (May 2, 1974)
• History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, BOOK V: Karl Popper Site offers free downloads by chapter available for public use.