Karl Popper facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Karl Raimond Popper
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Sir Karl Popper c. 1980s
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| Born | July 28, 1902 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | September 17, 1994 (aged 92) London, England |
| Era | 20th century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
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Main interests
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Epistemology Philosophy of science Social and political philosophy |
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Notable ideas
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Falsifiability Hypothetico-deductive method Open society |
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Influences
Kant · Schopenhauer · Hegel Einstein · Kierkegaard · Wittgenstein Vienna Circle · Tarski · Selz Russell · Campbell · Burke |
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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, and also wrote on social and political philosophy, especially the evils of totalitarian ideas and politics. Popper is known for the idea of empirical falsification.
Early life
Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) 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, Dr. Simon Siegmund Carl Popper, was a doctor of law at the University of Vienna and a bibliophile who had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library. Popper inherited from him both the library and the disposition.
In 1919 he became attracted by Marxism and subsequently 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 became disillusioned by Marx and abandoned the ideology and remained a passive supporter of social liberalism throughout his life.
In 1928 he earned a doctorate in Psychology and taught secondary school from 1930 to 1936. He published his first book, Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), in 1934. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability.
Career
In 1937, the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss led Popper to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College New Zealand (at Christchurch). In 1946, he moved to England to become a reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor in 1949.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active for the rest of his life. He was invested with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982. Popper was a member of the Academy of Humanism and described himself as an agnostic, showing respect for the moral teachings of Judaism and Christianity.
Popper won many awards and honours in his field, including the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, the Sonning Prize, and fellowships in the Royal Society, British Academy, London School of Economics, King's College London, Darwin College Cambridge, and Charles University, Prague. Austria awarded him the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold.
Philosophy
Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Popper argued strongly that scientific theories are abstract in nature and can be tested only indirectly. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings.
In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—that is, how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time.
Among his contributions to philosophy is his claim to have solved the philosophical problem of induction. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will rise, it is possible to formulate the theory that every day the sun will rise; if it does not rise on some particular day, the theory will be falsified and will have to be replaced by a different one. Until that day, there is no need to reject the assumption that the theory is true.
Popper agreed with David Hume that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow and that there is no logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past.
Popper did not think that the mind is a substance separate from the body: he thought that mental or psychological properties or aspects of people are distinct from physical ones.
Death
He died in 1994. After cremation, Popper's ashes were taken to Vienna and buried at Lainz cemetery adjacent to the ORF Centre, where his wife Josefine Anna Henninger - who had died in Austria several years before had already been buried.
Published works
- The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, 1930–1933 (as a typescript circulating as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie; as a German book 1979, as English translation 2008), ISBN: 0415394317
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934 (as Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959), ISBN: 0415278449
- The Poverty of Historicism, 1936 (private reading at a meeting in Brussels, 1944–45 as a series of journal articles in Econometrica, 1957 a book), ISBN: 0415065690
- The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945 Vol 1 ISBN: 0415290635, Vol 2 ISBN: 0415290635
- Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, 1956–57 (as privately circulated galley proofs; published as a book 1982), ISBN: 0415091128
- The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, 1956–57 (as privately circulated galley proofs; published as a book 1982), ISBN: 0415078652
- Realism and the Aim of Science, 1956–57 (as privately circulated galley proofs; published as a book 1983), ISBN: 0091514509
- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1963, ISBN: 0415043182
- Of Clouds and Clocks: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man, 1965
- Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972, Rev. ed., 1979, ISBN: 0198750242
- Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, 2002 [1976]. ISBN: 0415285895)
- The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (with Sir John C. Eccles), 1977, ISBN: 0415058988
- In Search of a Better World, 1984, ISBN: 0415135486
- Die Zukunft ist offen (The Future is Open) (with Konrad Lorenz), 1985 (in German), ISBN: 349200640X
- A World of Propensities, 1990, ISBN: 1855060000
- The Lesson of this Century, (Interviewer: Giancarlo Bosetti, English translation: Patrick Camiller), 1992, ISBN: 0415129583
- All Life is Problem Solving, 1994, ISBN: 0415249929
- The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (edited by Mark Amadeus Notturno) 1994. ISBN: 0415135559
- Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem: In Defence of Interaction (edited by Mark Amadeus Notturno) 1994 ISBN: 0415115043
- The World of Parmenides, Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, 1998, Edited by Arne F. Petersen with the assistance of Jørgen Mejer, ISBN: 0415173019
- 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.) ISBN: 978-0415309080
- Frühe Schriften, 2006 (Edited by Troels Eggers Hansen, includes Popper's writings and publications from before the Logic, including his previously unpublished thesis, dissertation and journal articles published that relate to the Wiener Schulreform.) ISBN: 978-3161476327
Images for kids
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Popper bust in the Arkadenhof of the University of Vienna
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Popper with Professor Cyril Höschl, while receiving an honorary doctorate from Charles University in Prague in May 1994.
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See also
In Spanish: Karl Popper para niños
