Popular Popper series complete

Spread the love

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.

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Popular Popper series complete

  1. Frank Lovell says:

    Delightfully fine work, Rafe!

    You are helping me become a better apostle for Popper and I can now go back to all the many folks I have (over the last three decades) enjoined to read OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE and CONJECTURES and OPEN SOCIETY who DIDN’T really read them (because they are not easy reads for most folks who are not yet aboard with his thinking) and recommend to them your Guides (all of which I now have in my Kindle, which goes with me everywhere); they are readable and affordable, great as companion reading with Popper’s books or even freestanding and as appetite-whetting introductions.

    May ALL of us here liberally extol the virtues of your newly-available guides, and hopefully in addition to enticing legions of folks to think critically rational you will shortly be deluged with well-deserved fresh revenue from sales!

    THANK YOU for all you do in promoting critical rationalism (in particular, and philosophy in general) with your lucid perspectives.

  2. Rafe says:

    readable and affordable are the keywords, Popperians have often been able to interest people in Popper’s ideas but quite understandably hardly any of the slightly interested people (or even more interested people) have the time to make inroads into six or twelve fat volumes, not to mention the cost.

    Several friends who have tolerated my interest in Popper without having any desire to read him when they see the books, are keen to read the guides when they see how short they are when they get a glimpse on my Kindle.

  3. Frank Lovell says:

    I rest m’case!!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

please answer (required): * Time limit is exhausted. Please reload the CAPTCHA.