Karl Popper is an Austrian-British philosopher who is most well known for his philosophy of science.
Pilosopher’s father was a lawyer and a member of the Viennese socialist movement. When he was six, his mother committed suicide. He was raised by his father’s brother, a wealthy industrialist who owned a factory in Prague.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Popper studied at the University of Vienna and met influential thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He taught at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand from 1937 to 1963. In 1965, he moved to England where he became a professor at the London School of Economics until he retired in 1969.
Popper’s main idea about science is that it can never prove anything with certainty because there’s always room for doubt or error. Scientific theories are always open to being disproved or falsified by new evidence — if they can’t be disproven, then they’re not really scientific theories at all. Popper’s writings on politics have been equally influential, especially his ideas on the open society and political realism, which he developed in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1952). The Open Society and Its Enemies consists of three volumes, covering historicist and Hegelian historicism in volume one, Marxist historicism in volume two and Plato’s theory of Forms as an alternative to historicism in volume three.
