Approaching the completion of my next book Misreading Popper, the obvious question came to mind: “So these are all the bad books about Popper, but what are the good ones”?
The format of the book at present has an opening chapter on Popper’s career and books, followed by a scan of the six themes and the ten leading standard errors. That provides a platform to indicate where commentators have gone astray, (1) by missing the themes (or disagreeing with them) and (2) committing one or more of the standard errors (and maybe others as well).
Clearly it is desirable to give some credit to people who wrote good books, and it is also important to provide short cuts to Popper’s ideas for people who cannot reasonably be expected to sit down and immediately read the whole of his published work or even a fraction of it.
So I will start to do an annotated bibliography as a step up from a bare list without the amount of work required for a full essay on the good books of Popper’s pupils and followers and other commentators. Some people must have done some of this, my mind has gone blank for the moment and this is a project where other people can help with suggestions and reminders.
Basic introductions: Bryan Magee (Fontana Popper), Colin Simkin, Roger James, bits of Medawar.
More than basic: Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher), Notturno, Agassi (rejected encyclopaedia piece)
The fundamentals of CR and non-justificationism: David Miller, Bartley, Agassi.
Objectivism and World 3. Jarvie (Concepts and Society), Watkins? Musgrave.
Social/Institutional turn and rules of the game: Jarvie, Agassi
Rationality: Agassi, Jarvie, Bartely
Metaphysics: Agassi (in Bunge and other sources)
Biology and Evolution: Bartley, Munz, Radnitzky, Wachterhauser, Watkins
Politics: Shearmur
Economics: Agassi, Boland, Wong, Caldwell
Psychology: Eccles, Berkson and Wettersten.
History: Munz
Collections of papers: Bunge (1964) Levinson (1982), a full edition of the journal etc, the Vienna papers and the Prague papers
On Line: The Popper Web etc
What about Watkin’s Science and Scepticism?