Worth reading? What’s his magnum opus?
I don’t know if he is “worth reading”, but I would like to read his The Open Society and It’s Enemies. Looks like he wrote about quantum physics too.
YES. I don’t know about magnum opus, but I’d recommend the Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Thanks.
Some of the worst (IMO) posters here are big fans of him. I don’t know why some people here are big fans of Hume either (Besides his theories on a sociological approach to some aspects of law, which are of secondary importance, he can be written off).
I recommend reading Wittgenstein, or some general history of philosophy, if you want to take a break from Austro-libertarian stuff. I will be happy to provide you some download links if you send me a private message.
Well, I want to take a break from heavy economic theory and my school work, and venture into some philosophy. But I have to agree with you when it comes to Hume. The regularity theory of causation, to me at least, is meaningless.
This is great stuff.
That is quite an extreme claim! Do you want to try to substantiate it?
Karl Popper is, without a doubt, worth reading, and his own philosophical contributions in both The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach provide further depth into Hayek’s own research program (to utilize a term of Lakatos) regarding the decentralized nature of knowledge, and his defense of freedom in The Constitution of Liberty and elsewhere. K. Popper himself stated that F.A. Hayek and A. Tarski were the living thinkers he learned the most from.
Of what I have hitherto read from K. Popper, I would most suggest Objective Knowledge due to the fact that it is a collection of essays that cover the breadth of his thought.
Its really annoying when there is a critique of anyone where the author has not bothered to both take aim at somebody’s primary focus (rather trying to proclaim a mere skirmish about objects of secondary important to be the winning battle), and has failed to fully learn what he is trying to critique. The author of the article never really mentioned Popper’s theory of science, which was the topic of his magnum opus The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and he fails to take into consideration Tarski’s theory of truth, which Popper endorses in Objective Knowledge. Furthermore, when speaking of Popper’s theory about the conjectural characteristic of knowledge, the author absolutely fails to even mention the thrust of Popper’s thesis: knowledge is evolutionary, and based on problem solving, which is, in my opinion, the greatest lesson to be learned from Popper.
Ergo, there is absolutely no way one could possible “judge for yourself” based on that article.
Karl Poppers - The Open Society and It’s Enemies: A Critique - by Roy Childs Jnr.
Perhaps Popper is valuable as an attack on positivism. I haven’t read enough to be completely sure of that, but that is what I have gathered.
I’m thinking Popper is empirical-positivism.
He rejected the verification principle and replaced it with falsification. So, at least relative to verificationists, he was anti-positivist. But it does bear a certain relation to positivism and can be said to be negativistic varient of it in some ways.
interesting points Brainpolice.[:)]
Here’s more of explanation as well:
[Like to point out that McCloskey was a hermeneutic, so no advocate of human action (philosophic moderate approach)]
"Yet, apart from McCloskey’s own position, his arguments directed against
modernism cannot count as amounting to anything. “So what,” the empiricist
could reply. McCloskey has shown that following the modernist precepts leads
to a peculiar form of relativism. Admittedly, some empiricists, most notably
Popper and his school, have not and still do not recognize this. McCloskey
is right in pointing this out again. But then he must admit that this has also
been realized by empiricists without causing them much intellectual pain. Was
it not Feyerabend who first and most forcefully drove the relativist message
home to Popperianism? And was not he himself a leader of this very school
who simply drew the ultimate logical conclusions of Popperianism? Empiricism
cannot explain the process of scientific development as a rational enterprise.
True enough. But it cannot account for it because the process is not rational.
And what is wrong with this? What is wrong with empiricism once
it admits its own relativism?
McCloskey gives no answer to these questions. He does not advance any
principled arguments that would prove empiricism to be a self-defeating
position. Nor does he challenge empiricism on the much more obvious empirical
front. It would seem to be evident that at least empiricism’s claim of
providing us with a correct epistemology of the natural sciences should, in view
of the facts, be regarded as incorrect." (the entire paper goes into the “why” of incorrectness)
It would seem that the logical conclusions of Popperianism mirrors its philosophic antagonists (hermeneutical) in the end anyways.
I’ve never read any of his work, but he is often quoted and revered by a favorite intellectual of mine, Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan
Instead of reading Popper, read Retreat to Commitment by W.W. Bartley III, one of Popper’s students. Afterward, read Popper.