R Sassower Release Date: 07 Mar 2004 Format: Hardback Pages: 1752 ISBN: 9780415180412 ISBN-10: 0415180414
Born in Austria, Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the 20th century. A ground-breaking thinker, he saw the essence of true science as being the readiness to submit theories to severe testing and to reject them when refuted by test. His first major book in 1935, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, marked him as a major analyst of science and was to have an enormous influence on the way people, including major scientists, came to think about the field. Popper contrasted his philosophy of science against Marxists and psychoanalysts such as Freud and Adler, who piled up 'confirmations' of their theories, but took no notice of refutations. He was scandalized by the way Marxists and other left-wing agitators were prepared to use human lives in order to achieve long-term (and dubious) political goals. His two major contributions to political philosophy The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism have had an abiding influence throughout the world, and led to the description of Popper on his obituaries as 'The Man who Destroyed Marx and Freud'. Philosophy of science remained central to Popper, but his explanation of how knowledge gr
