Chapter 4 the Genesis of Karl Popper's Philosophical
CHAPTER 4 THE GENESIS OF KARL POPPER’S PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS 4.0 Introduction Karl Popper was one of the most prominent philosophers in the past century as he has been the most prolific, wide-ranging and the most influential among scientists. This sentence is evident as attested to the statement made by Sir Peter Medawar, a winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine and himself an experienced analyst of scientific thought and practise, that says: ‘I think Popper is incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been.’ Medawar’s judgment was subsequently affirmed by other eminent scientists, such as Sir Herman Bondi, who wrote, ‘there is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said’; and in similar vein, Sir John Eccles, another Nobel Prize winner, testified to the impact of Popper’s philosophy on his approach to research: ‘my scientific life owes so much to my conversion in 1945… to Popper’s teachings on the conduct of investigations… I have endeavoured to follow Popper in the formulation and in the investigation of fundamental problems in neurobiology’ (Magee 1975). Furthermore, recent survey of scholarly literature on totalitarianism and on social science methodology found him mentioned more often than any philosopher, including Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Thomas Kuhn.56 And, in fact, in a time in the 56 Peter Hedström, Richard Swedberg, and Lars Udéhn in their “Popper’s Situational Analysis and Contemporary Sociology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 28 (1998), 342-3, survey the five leading sociology journals in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy (1960-96).
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