Popular Popper series complete

With the publication of  the guide to Objective Knowledge  overnight the five volumes of the Popular Popper series are now published on Amazon, going head to head with Mills and Boone in the $3.99 price bracket.

The first,  The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1935 in German and 1959 in English, is not a good introductory book although it is the most important book on the philosophy of science in modern times and all educated people need to understand the main lines of Popper’s thought, especially the six “turns” that he promoted. I will do a post on the turns later.

Each book in the series has a set of appendices to sketch Popper’s career, the six “turns”, the misrepresentation of his ideas from the very beginning by the mainstream philosophers, the top ten standard errors that are perpetuated  today and some case studies.

The Poverty of Historicism was written while Popper was on vacation in the south sea islands during WWII. It is the shortest of his books and he thought it was his most worst writing, though I think it is clear enough.

The  Open Society and its Enemies grew out of some notes that he made for Section 10 in The Poverty.

The Open Society was his war effort, aiming to combine the best parts of social democracy and classical liberalism so that there would be less confusion and division among the friends of freedom. The result was a book that was scorned by conservatives and the left alike, so it is practically impossible to find on university reading lists and it is kept in print by a lay readership.

Conjectures and Refutations (1963) is a collection of 40 pieces that were mostly deliverd as speeches and presentations during the 1950s. It provides a comprehensive guide to the range of Popper’s thought, unlike The Poverty (1957) and The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).

Objective  Knowledge  (1973) had the misfortune to appear a decade after the appearance of <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> by T. S. Kuhn which swept the field in the 1960s. Popper’s stocks were falling under the influence of criticism from Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. Bartley, arguable his most brilliant and energetic supporter, was no longer on the team after a falling-out with Popper in 1965. In addition Popper retired in 1969 and this meant that he no longer had an institutional base in the London School of Economics.

Imre Lakatos became the new king and “kingmaker” in the LSE. The general perception of his program was that he was trying to save whatever could be retrived from the wreck of “Popperian falsificationism”, supposedly sunk by criticism from Kuhn, Feyerabend and himself. It is probably more realistic to say that the was attempting to effect a Hegelian synthesis of Popper’s theory of programs and Kuhn’s paradigm theory while admitting a whiff of induction to keep on side with the logical empiricists. This involved a great deal of “whatever it takes” academic politics. As a battle-hardened Stalinist operative Lakatos had the political part of the game well in hand as long as he lived but the enterprise did not thrive after his death in 1974 because it had  no intellectual legs to stand on. However he did succeed in killing the momentum of critical rationalism in the form that was taught by Popper and others who had a better understanding of Popper’s ideas.

And so it goes.

After the Popular Popper series there will be a Critical Rationalist Papers series of Amazon ebooks consisting of 30,000 word collections of papers from the Rathouse and other sources.