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"One of the main tasks for human reason is to make the universe we live in understandable to ourselves. This is the task of science. There are two different components of about equal importance in this enterprise. The first is poetic inventiveness ..."
– Karl Popper
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Monthly Archives: August 2010
Reason on the offensive: the return of the Enlightenment
That is the heading of a recent piece in The Weekend Australian newspaper by Luke Slattery, an experienced reporter and editor on education, arts and letters. He has been a sympathetic but critical commentator on postmodernism (sympathetic, like myself, in the sense of being prepared to … Continue reading
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CR Scholar 4:Michael Giffin
Michael Giffin is a US-born scholar and editor, based in Sydney. Well versed in philosophy and hermeneutics from Aristotle to the present, his special research interest is the nineteenth and twentieth century novel in English that interrogates classical metaphysics from a neoclassical, … Continue reading
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CR Scholar 3: Jack Birner
Jack Birner, né en 1951, a étudié les affaires commerciales et administratives internationales à Nijenrode-Breukelen, aux Pays-Bas. Puis, il s’est orienté vers l’économie et la philosophie à l’université d’État du Michigan (BA en 1972). Il a commencé des études de … Continue reading
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Popper, Smith and the Aristotelian/Austrian program
The purpose of this note is to sketch the similarities between the metaphysical framework that Barry Smith identified as the framework for Carl Menger’s economics and the framework that Popper developed in debate with the physicists. Smith’s story is summarised … Continue reading
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Education reform in Vienna and its impact on Popper
A new entry on Otto Neurath in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some fascinating historical material on the education reform movement in Vienna and the way this involved the philosophers and psychologists and impacted on Popper. Karl Buhler was a key person, … Continue reading
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James Garvie on Popper
James Garvey, The Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books Continuum, London 2006 The authors of the 20 greatest books are Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Berkeley, de Beauvoir, Descarates, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Locke, Marx, Mill, Neitzsche, Plato, Popper, Rousseau, Sartre, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. “Popper … Continue reading
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Gene Callahan digs in
Gene Callahan has kicked off quite a debate with his post on evolutionary epistemology that was noted the other day. There are now over 80 comments. His main point seems to be that EE provides no “warrants” for knowledge approaching … Continue reading
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Critical Rationalism in a Nutshell
This thought has been hovering around in my mind for a while. It seems to me the core of the critical rationalist mindset. We create our problems by choosing our ends, and we can dissolve them just by changing our … Continue reading
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A more critical view of Alan Chalmers on Popper
Alan Chalmers wrote a sensationally successful introductory book on the philosophy of science. What is this thing called science? first appeared in 1976 with revised editions in 1982 and 1999. Translated into fifteen languages it became a bestseller and a … Continue reading
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Stanford Encylopedia Criticisms
This is a follow up to Rafe’s post The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy vs Karl Popper in which I reply to the Encyclopedia’s criticism of Popper’s position. Continue reading
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