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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Austrian-British philosopher of science — falsifiability and the open society
London School of Economics · Austria / United Kingdom · d. 28 July 1902 (Vienna) — 17 September 1994 (Kenley, London)
Set out falsifiability as the mark of science in Logik der Forschung, printed in Vienna at the end of 1934 with 1935 on its title page, and wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in wartime New Zealand as his 'war effort'. Taught at the London School of Economics from 1946 to 1969, was knighted in 1965, and died at Kenley, south of London, on 17 September 1994.
Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen on 7 October 1885. At Como in 1927 he introduced complementarity, the idea that a quantum object needs two mutually exclusive descriptions and that neither is the whole truth. Philosophers still disagree whether that is a claim about nature, knowledge or language. Poe died and Desmond Tutu was born on the same date.
Immanuel Kant, Karl Popper
Thirty-two years after his death, Karl Popper survives in two places: the science classroom, where falsifiability is a slogan the philosophy of science abandoned decades ago, and the political argument, where the open society and the paradox of tolerance are more alive, and more misquoted, than ever.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper died on 17 September 1994, John Searle on the same date in 2025, Hildegard of Bingen in 1179. Thirty-nine men signed a constitution in Philadelphia on the day in 1787. Each answered the same question differently: when someone claims to know, who or what stands behind the claim?
John Searle, Karl Popper
