Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born British philosopher of science and professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science; for advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; and for his defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible.

Further reading

• Feyerabend, P. Against Method. London: New Left Books, 1975. A splendidly polemical, iconoclastic book by a former colleague of Popper's. Vigorously critical of Popper's rationalist view of science.
• Kadvany, John Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8223-2659-0. Explains how Imre Lakatos developed Popper's philosophy into a historicist and critical theory of scientific method.
• Hacohen, M. Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902 ? 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Central to contemporary philosophy of science is the debate between the followers of Kuhn and Popper on the nature of scientific enquiry. This is the book in which the views of the former received their classical statement.
• Magee, B. Popper. London: Fontana, 1977. An elegant introductory text. Very readable, albeit rather uncritical of its subject.
• O'Hear, A. Karl Popper. London: Routledge, 1980. A critical account of Popper's thought, viewed from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy.
• Radnitzky, G., Bartley, W. W., eds. Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press 1987. ISBN 0-8126-9039-7. A strong collection of essays by Popper, Campbell, Munz, Flew, et al, on Popper's epistemology and critical rationalism. Includes a particularly vigorous answer to Rorty's criticisms.
• Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 2 vols. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1974. One of the better contributions to the Library of Living Philosophers series. Contains Popper's intellectual autobiography, a comprehensive range of critical essays, and Popper's responses to them.
• Stokes, G. Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. A very comprehensive, balanced study, which focuses largely on the social and political side of Popper's thought.
• Weimer, W., Palermo, D., eds. Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. See Hayek's essay, "The Sensory Order after 25 Years", and "Discussion".