PHI 030
April 15, 2015
Karl Popper
1902-1994
"[Popper] combined a combative personality with a zeal for self-aggrandisement that did little to endear him to professional colleagues at a personal level."
— Stephen Thornton
"[Popper] combined a combative personality with a zeal for self-aggrandisement that did little to endear him to professional colleagues at a personal level." Popper's Views
- Took prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive or historicist) approach to philosophy of science
- Does not think science has one method
- Accepted David Hume's critique of induction, and went further claiming science doesn't use induction
- Instead, science has a very particular logic of falsification
Popper's Targets
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| Karl Marx 1818-1883 |
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 |
Alfred Adler 1870-1937 |
Popper's Hero (or Exemplar)
"Einstein's theory was highly ‘risky’, in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in the light of the then dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies—confirmed by Eddington's experiments in 1919)."
— Stephen Thornton
"Einstein's theory was highly ‘risky’, in the sense that it was possible to deduce consequences from it which were, in the light of the then dominant Newtonian physics, highly improbable (e.g., that light is deflected towards solid bodies—confirmed by Eddington's experiments in 1919)."