Karl Popper

1902-1994 · Austrian-British · Philosophy of Science, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Critical Rationalism

We can never know; we can only guess.

Growing up in Vienna, Karl Popper watched the intellectual circles of his youth — Marxists, Freudians, Adlerians — explain everything and learn nothing. That observation became the engine of his life's work. He fled the Anschluss for New Zealand, then settled at the London School of Economics, where he remained one of the century's most combative thinkers.

Topics Karl Popper addresses

• falsifiability
• the demarcation problem
• conjectures and refutations
• the problem of induction
• corroboration
• critical rationalism
• the open society
• the closed society
• historicism
• the poverty of historicism
• piecemeal social engineering
• utopian social engineering
• World 3
• the three-worlds ontology
• objective knowledge
• evolutionary epistemology
• verisimilitude
• the propensity interpretation of probability
• the bucket and the searchlight
• the deductive method of testing
• the critique of Plato
• the critique of Hegel
• the critique of Marx
• psychoanalysis as pseudoscience

Converse with Karl Popper on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Karl Popper's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.