1 Life and works

Born in Vienna in 1902, the youngest child of a barrister, Karl Raimund Popper was educated at the University of Vienna, where he studied mathematics, music, psychology, physics and philosophy. He taught in secondary school between 1930 and 1936. Apprehension about Nazism persuaded him to emigrate in 1937, to become lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, New Zealand. In January 1946 he became Reader in Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics, was promoted to professor in 1949, and retired from full-time teaching in 1969. Among many honours, he was knighted in 1965, elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976, and made a Companion of Honour in 1982.

After a specialized start in the philosophy of science, Popper revealed himself as a philosopher of wide reach, making contributions across the spectrum from Presocratic studies to modern logic, from politics to probability, and from the mind–body problem to the interpretation of quantum theory. With all of his books in print, and translated into many languages, Popper’s is one of the most discussed philosophies of the century. Yet, he insisted, his ideas are systematically misunderstood and misrepresented; this led him to devote uncommon energy to issues of interpretation and commentary on his own work.

Popper published three major works between 1935 and 1945. The first,Logik der Forschung (1935), his theory of science, appeared in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery only in 1959. The second, The Poverty of Historicism (1957), first appeared in 1944–5 and extended his theory of science to history and society, severely criticizing the notion of historical laws. The third, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), is a two-volume treatise on the philosophy of history, politics and society.

Popper’s other principal works consist of two collections of major papers, Conjectures and Refutations (1962), and Objective Knowledge (1972); a Library of Living Philosophers volume (1974) containing an intellectual autobiography and a set of replies to his critics, the former appearing separately as Unended Quest (1976); a collaboration with Sir John Eccles on a study of the mind–body problem, The Self and Its Brain (1977); Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (The Two Basic Problems of the Theory of Knowledge) (1979), the extant fragment of the book he was writing before Logik der Forschung superseded it; and the long-delayed Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (1982–3), much of which dates from the period 1955–7. Most of these books have seen multiple editions, involving sometimes minor and sometimes major changes. Throughout his career Popper also produced many original papers on diverse topics, and lectured all over the world. His manuscripts and correspondence fill some 450 archive cartons at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.