Karl Popper A Centenary Assessment

Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge

Karl Popper – Introduction Sir

Popper commanded international audiences and conversation with him was an intellectual adventure even if a little rough animated by a myriad of philosophical problems. His intense desire to tear away at the veneer of falsity in pursuit of the truth lead him to contribute to a field of thought encompassing (among others) political theory, quantum mechanics, logic, scientific method and evolution...

The views of Karl Popper and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on a theory of rationality

Typical of some contemporary theories of rationality is the pithily formulated idea stated almost 20 years ago by Gillian Rose (1947-1995) in her autobiography: «Reason, the critical criterion, is forever without ground». One important way of understanding this statement is found in the early writings of Karl R. Popper (1902-1994). This statement expresses the conviction at the root of Popper’s...

KARL POPPER The Problem of Induction

A scientist, whether theorist or experimenter, puts forward statements, or systems of statements, and tests them step by step. In the field of the empirical sciences, more particularly, he constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against experience by observation and experiment. I suggest that it is the task of the logic of scientific discovery, or the logic of knowledge, t...

Karl Popper’s Quantum Ghost

Karl Popper, though not trained as a physicist and embarrassed early in his career by a physics error pointed out by Einstein and Bohr, ultimately made substantial contributions to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. As was often the case, Popper initially formulated his position by criticizing the views of others—in this case Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Underlying Popper’s criticism...