Popper Selections

I noticed that the only review of this was rated at three stars and thought "Oh, come on! How can this be anything less than five?".Unless you're onto the "hard stuff" of Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations, Objective Knowledge and The Open Society and Its Enemies this is your best bet for the most important philosopher of the 20th century. It was the second Popper-related book I read. The first, Bryan Magee's "Popper", is an excellent summary. This book goes a little further in actually being Popper's writings. He had a fantastic style and a very clear train of thought. Reading it is a liberating experience: here is a great philosopher grappling with real problems, formulating real solutions and communicating in a way that you can understand.A life changing (or at least intellectual-life changing) book.

Popper is widely known, and extremely influential philosopher of science who doesn’t need an introduction by me. He cannot be avoided whether in academia or just on reddit. In that sense, this Reader is an excellent overview of his thought, and since so much of his thought was both consistent throughout his life, and self referential (his political and social philosophy, is based on his philosophy of science, and so on), a Reader such as this is able to provide the proper background for anyone who wants a working knowledge of Popper’s philosophy.The book lacks a way to easily navigate to contemporary debates relevant to the selections in question, as they are arranged by theme rather than chronology, but other than that the coverage is excellent.His philosophy is that of scientific realism matched with epistemological anti-realism, or agnosticism, with some important contradictions. Popper famously accepts Hume’s critique of induction, so essentially, we cannot know anything. He replaces this with the ‘logic of scientific discovery’, the equally famous ‘falsifiability test’ - can we falsify a theory, and therefore replace it with a better one, physics yes, psychoanalysis or Marxism, no. As has been pointed out many times, how this ultimately stays true (or surpasses) Hume’s critique is not clear - Popper’s realism about the empirical, material world (or World 1 as he calls it) is clear to see, but he maintains an agnosticism or relativism regarding knowledge of that material world (World 3), and so the question of Being/Thinking, or representation/mediation, is not addressed sufficiently in my view. This is what Roy Bhaskar has called the ‘epistemological fallacy’.But of course as Bhaskar points out, this is not an epistemological question but fundamentally a metaphysical-ontological one. Where is the ‘logic’ of falsifiability - where does it live, what is it’s ontological status? Does it flow in a determinate way from the concrete World 1, in which case, how can we find out about it? Or does it belong, along with all other forms of logic and maths, to the abstract World 3, in which case, what makes it real? Without answering this, which nowhere in this selection does Popper even attempt to, he is essentially a realist about the noumea, but a relativist, or at least a fuzzy-realist, about phenomena. He’s a Kantian of sorts, except, when it applies to his own philosophy. Popper then has access to the noumea, but no one else, including his beloved scientists, do.This would be fine, it would be an inconsistent philosophy of science, except insofar as Hume is used to undermine all philosophy of presence from Plato to Hegel, in one all-encompassing sweep. Metaphysics is dead, because of the problem of induction, except for Popper’s own metaphysics (which is what the three worlds ontology is). No mechanism for mediation between World 1, 2, 3 is presented - to look for one is ‘non-science’ (nonsense), despite Popper’s view that all three worlds are real - albeit, some are more real than others. A bit like liberal humanism, we are equal, but….I would say the influence on Kuhn or Feyerabend, in this respect, is obvious, albeit slightly counter-intuitive, as Popper’s pseudo-Humeanism allows him to weather later post-structuralist critics but also to become the patron saint of the 1990s ‘end of history’ trend, a la Stephen Pinker.This is the revenge of World 2, the world of class and psychology and motivation, and makes Popper’s political allegiance to the ‘radical centre’ of liberal capitalism (despite the obvious and understandable reasons he was repelled by all forms of totalitarianism), quite easy to discern. It’s a technocratic Panglossian view of the world.Popper’s scientific realism is well known, and even to some extent, so is the underlying Kantianism - based as it is, on the Neo-Kantian origins of logical positivism. But the false-Humeanism, which stresses our impotence in the face of World 1, is in my view less well known. We cannot know, let alone change, the material conditions, so there is no point in trying. That is not a philosophy of ‘openness’, of the best of all possible worlds, but one of emptiness and greyness.

A good selection of writings from a important philosopher. Covers most important areas of the writings of Karl Popper. Well edited