| Title | : | Karl Popper |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0670019674 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780670019670 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 115 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1973 |
Karl Popper Reviews
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Never has someone moved up so quickly in my hierarchy of favorite philosophers. The overviews of Popper's views and scholarship, as laid out in this book, are extremely clear and corrective to the many misapprehensions that people have regarding his work. I certainly recognized some of my own biases based on superficial understandings of his work, and couldn't be more motivated to take a deeper dive into his many insights, of both an epistemic and political nature, which have been all too ignored over the past century.
Highly recommend this easy read to anyone interested in this sort of stuff. -
I really enjoyed this slim volume explaining Popper's views on science, logic, and government.
Money quote: "What this comes down to is the assertion that before you change anything, you must change everything, which is self-contradictory. Second, whatever actions we take will have some unintended consequences which may easily be at odds with our blueprint. And the more wholesale the action the more plentiful the unintended consequences. To claim rationality for sweeping plans to change society as a whole is to claim a degree of detailed sociological knowledge which we simply do not possess." -
This small book is a great resource for understanding Karl Popper's wide-ranging and worldview which is all the more important given that a lot of serious people misunderstand (even the fundamentals) of Popper.
Magee shows a deep understanding and appreciate for Popper, adequately explaining Popper's thinking on epistemology, science, democracy and the open-society, and how they are all intimately connected.
Maggee clears up that Popper is not a logical positivist or verificationalist (or a cousin such as a falsificationist). Popper was very critical of logical positivism and his theory of demarcation between science and non-science was not one between meaning and nonsense. To the contrary, Popper viewed many philosophical theories (including his own) as very meaningful. -
Really an excellent introduction to Popper. If all the Fontana series were like this, it could have been the best introductory series on philosophy ever produced (sadly it is far too spotty to ever achieve that title, just look at MacIntyre's text on Marcuse, which is hardly an introduction).
I had to consciously separate my views personally of Popper from the quality of the text. I think a lot of incorrect statements are made, especially with regard to Marx (the stereotype that Marx was a scientistic determinist irritated me to no end, especially when it is commented that, if one reads Popper, no rational individual could remain a Marxist, since it is plainly incorrect). But despite this, Magee writes pleasantly, and with obvious admiration for the subject matter. The product is a very clear, concise, and readable introduction to Popper's key ideas, and without much of the muddied confusions that even first year philosophy of science courses often bring with them.
If you're going to read Popper and looking for an introduction, this may as well be it. -
Interessante korte introductie op Popper, een van de centrale wetenschapsfilosofen uit de 20ste eeuw. Popper heeft een sceptisch instrumentarium voorgesteld met zijn falsificatiecriterium en eisen voor het demarcatieprobleem. Wanneer mag men spreken over objectiviteit of goede wetenschap? Hoewel hii volgens Magee geen sluitend antwoord biedt is Popper volgens mij interessant om naast Thomas Kuhn te houden, om de specifieke dynamiek van wetenschapsbeoefening te begrijpen.
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Blew my mind and gave focus to a lot of issues that bugged me about how work is done and the inefficiency inherent in the "way they always have done it" mindset. How do you deal with institutional knowledge when the key person who has been there for a long time leaves and takes that history and knowledge with them, leaving behind people who have huge gaps in the proven methods of doing their work? Knowledge Management. It makes so much sense to Virgos!
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Wow, I loved this little book and anticipate reading it again, in addition to attempting something from Popper himself. The author describes Popper's philosophy as a "philosophy of action" and contrasts it with other philosophical theories as deeply practical, truly a compass to live by versus an intellectual exercise that ends in a twisted puzzle of unanswerable questions. The book covers, in a concise 100 pages or so, his main fields of thought: science/truth, the evolution of knowledge, and politics. I enjoyed the former two the most but given the current state of politics in the US, I am interested to dive deeper into the latter.
Popper dismantles a question that has, according to the author, vexed philosophy for centuries - how science, and knowledge itself, is built on a faulty foundation. Criticisms of science, Popper later refutes, say it is built on inductive reasoning. You observe facts and when you see something enough times, you develop a theory. To use the analogy borrowed by Taleb's book "Black Swan", which drove me to find Popper, if you have a theory that there are only white swans and find only white swans for hundreds of years, then you convert it to a natural law due to massive accumulation of evidence. But it only takes one black swan to destroy this natural law. If science is built solely on past observations to predict the future, then you actually can't know anything because one new fact can overturn all knowledge. Popper turns this problem on its head by saying that science, and the search for truth, is actually the attempt to disprove what we know, the constant searching for evidence that is contrary to what we think we know. And that truth is actually unattainable, but we can only get closer and closer over time, less and less wrong. I love the idea of celebrating wrongness as a way to guide your thinking and his embrace of uncertainty as a fundamental aspect of being human, unsettling though it is.
The second area, the evolution of knowledge, was even more fun to read. He seems to say that evolution itself is simply life's efforts to solve problems and that, by extension, life is driven by problem solving. Life transforming from bacteria to more complex forms of life was driven by life adapting to problems, "solving" issues with how to grow and get energy. Over millions of years, animals begin making sounds to communicate, growls and snorts, another problem solving strategy. Eventually, in what he terms World 3 (World 1 is the physical world, World 2 is inside our minds, i.e., thoughts), humans invent language (among other things in World 3), a system that objectively exists but is outside of ourselves and over time evolves in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways, creating new problems to solve that we couldn't have anticipated. Math is in World 3, we invented the numbers 1, 2, and 3 to solve some problem, probably to keep track of goblets of beer to feed the workers or something like that, but the invention created new problems like the existence of odd and even numbers, prime numbers and exploding out from there the most complex concepts that even modern computers struggle to solve. And I think, knowledge is created, reason is created, and the search for truth is created with World 3. Art, politics, science, all that makes us human was launched with the creation of World 3. There is plenty more to say on this and frankly, I struggle to capture the implications, but it was fascinating.
The last section is on politics, evidently Popper wrote a devastating argument against Marx, and less successfully Plato, which seems to be founded on the impossibility of predicting the future or designing policy interventions that have the exact intended effects as predicted. This reality creates a terrible cycle for people driven to build a Utopia (Marxists) or those driven to go backwards to some nostalgic past and thus arrest further change, in which the adherents of those faulty ideas are forced to use violence to reach their aims but the goal is unattainable, and thus the spiral to chaos. Popper wants a society built on his view of truth, always being sought but never reached, and an admission that we will often be wrong, have unintended consequences, but where new approaches are welcome because we all know that only through experimentation and trying new things can we ever make life better for humans...or something like that, not sure I am nailing it perfectly here. -
This book was recommended by David Deutsch in the bibliography of "The Beginning of Infinity". A slim work, (107 pages), it is very information dense. If you read both books, you will understand how Deutsch drew heavily on Popper's work. Popper was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century when it comes to the clarity and quality of his work, although others such as Wittegenstein drew larger cult followings. The first part of the book discusses Popper's brillant solution to the poblem of induction. In Popper's entire epistemology and philosophy of science, induction is not required. In fact, the source of theories is immaterial - all that matters is if the theories are falsafiable. Theories are created as the result of creative acts to solve problems, not on the basis of induction from observation. All observations, in fact, are theory-ladden. Theories come prior to observation, not the other way around.
The book gets very interesting towards the end, in the discussion of Popper's devastating critique of Marxism and more generally all form of historicism and Utopianism. One also gets a glimpse his passionate, compelling argument for an "open society" and democratic institutions. As acknowledged by the author, the book doesn't get into his Ethics very much, only glimpses are given.
Altogether this is a worthwhile read, sort of like a "Cliff Notes" versison for thoes who don't have the time or patience to wade through Popper's vast actual writings. Some quotes from Popper are included throughout. -
The father of falsification, Karl Popper, recommends that we formulate theories in clear and transparent ways to expose them unambiguously to refutation. This method of criticism is a constant feedback loop so we never really *know* anything. We're always in the loop: problem--trial solution--measure/expose errors/learn--reformulate problem/discover new ones. Popper is essentially the founding father of lean startup. If a statement or idea can't be tested and disproven with empirical evidence then it isn't science. ****
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Engaging and readable summary of Popper's works.
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Brilliant distillation of Popper's key ideas. Anyone interested in Sir Karl would do well to start here.
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The basic introduction to Popper's central ideas.
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A cogent and compact summary of Popper’s views and contributions, from falsification to his argument against Marxism and Utopianism
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Magee is a great communicator and packs more than is possible (in both senses) in this tiny little book. He makes a good case, and I'm definitely tuning to popper's own books next.
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This book is a brilliant introduction to Popper's approach to his "critical rationalism" in philosophy and "fragmented societal engineering" in politics.
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In het Nederlands: Popper, Aula 533, 1974.
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Magee's writings are always very clear and descriptive. That doesn't mean they are easy. To me, a physicist, they are not. I always have to go back and read them a second and third (and sometimes even a 4th time). But he sums up very well what other philosophers (in this case Popper) are saying, in ways that those philosophers themselves cannot do.
Best quote: "All that matters is that one should have an interesting problem and be genuinely trying to solve it." -
Slightly biased going into this as a firm adherent to the parallels of Science and the Arts (I think they are the same thing).
An excellent introduction to Popper's philosophy. Extremely well written, intriguing and engaging text, Magee has adroitly distilled substantial ideas in a way that makes you want more!
I am very excited to start my journey into Popper's works after reading this.
A must for all Artists, Scientists and Sociologists -
Product Description
Karl Popper has been hailed as the greatest philosopher of all time and as a thinker whose influence is ackowledged by a variety of scholars. This work demonstrates Popper's importance across the whole range of philosophy and provides an introduction to the main themes of philosophy itself.
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very readable for Popper enthusiats
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A clear, crisp and concise introduction to Karl Popper's philosophy of knowledge science and society.
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Few introductions are a brilliant written as this one. Written by a man who really understands the thinking of Karl Popper and how to make it clear for the reader. 4 1/2 stars.
