Karl Popper

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Austrian-born, British Philosopher

19??-199?

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Karl Popper is perhaps the philosopher of science who has made the greatest impact within the 20th century scientific community. He is famous for the view, first set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, that scientific theories, insofar as they make general claims, cannot be proved, but can only be refuted, on the basis of our observation and experience. Popper founded the tradition of critical rationalism: science aims at bold conjectures, which it then seeks to subject to the severest possible tests.

Popper's ontology allows for so-called "third world" objects, such as theories themselves. The critical rationalist can be thought of as a third world evolutionist, who values theoretical mutations and variants, and the action of critical selective filters on them.

Popper's political philosophy was uncompromising in its commitment to the freedom of human inquiry. His book The Open Society and Its Enemies is a famous attack on the totalitarianism and authoritarianism of various social philosophies.

Beginning at the margins of the Vienna Circle in the late 1920s, Popper's career took an interesting turn when he emigrated as a refugee to New Zealand before the Second World War (helped in securing a position there by Rudolf Carnap). During the war he was refused a lectureship at the University of Sydney on the grounds that he was an Austrian citizen!

He later moved to the London School of Economics, where he established a major philosophical tradition that created a constant frisson against the background of the dominant Oxbridge tradition of sometimes nit-picking, and often complacent or xenophobic, analytical philosophy.