Author Archives: Rafe

Stephen Hicks has posted a link to a survey of US philosophers to find out  how they ranked the books and articles of the 20th century. Using the Philosophers’ Email Directory, we mailed our questionnaire to 5,000 teachers of philosophy. … Continue reading →

This is something a bit different but closely related to the study of metaphysical research programs.  My friend Michael Giffin, another independent scholar in Sydney has made a deep study of metaphysical themes in modern literature, focussed on female novelists … Continue reading →

Writing about the Popperian “turns”provides an opportunity to acknowledge the work of Popper’s research assistants and editors who helped along the way. Think of them as the Sorcerer’s apprentices, or perhaps the elves in Santa’s toy factory. Joe Agassi’s book about … Continue reading →

When Popper wrote Logik der Forschung the notion of truth was problematic and he avoided talking about it until Tarski developed the use of metalanguages to permit a formal statement of the correspondence theory of truth that was robust in … Continue reading →

From “Popper on the Differences between the Natural and the Social Sciences” in In Pursuit of Truth, Paul Levinson (ed), 1982. Popper always sough to communicate with other philosophers, but he underestimated the neurotic element there would be in the reception … Continue reading →

Problem: how did so many hard-working, bright and ambitious people manage to work on the philosophy and methodology of economics without producing much that is helpful for working economists and policy-makers? This became a growth area during the 1980s with … Continue reading →

Working on the early reception of Popper’s ideas and the way the “Popper Legend” became established – the idea that he could be aggregated with the positivists and logical empiricists and hence ignored when their program was eventually discredited. Starting … Continue reading →

Feynman’s account of the procedure for looking for a scientific law: Guess, compute the consequences of the guess, check if they agree with the evidence and if the evidence persistently refuses to agree, the guess (hypothesis) is wrong. Science is about … Continue reading →

Habermas is probably the last high-profile member of the Frankfurt School of German Marxists. Google up Frankfurt School for more information, other key players were Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. These were big names in decades past but the world has … Continue reading →

This book makes interesting reading in parallel with Popper’s introductory lectures on the philosophy of science. Jim Watson’s  book The Double Helix demonstrated how  Watson and his colleague Francis Crick engaged in Popperian “conjecture and refutation”;  here Crick did even … Continue reading →