Category Archives: epistemology

Flemming Steen Nielsen: A Personal Recollection of Popper

From: Sandhedens Sider, Institute of Philosophy, Copenhagen, Autumn 1994 Happy Acquaintance With a Difficult Person In memoriam Karl Raimund Popper, 26.7.1902-17.9.1994. By Flemming Steen Nielsen One morning a few weeks ago my friend Troels Eggers Hansen (theoretical physicist, editor of … Continue reading

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Railway lines of thought

One of the themes which I developed some years ago concerned the way ideas take hold and exert an influence on our thoughts and our research projects which is very hard to identify, to subject to critical appraisal and to … Continue reading

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Popper vs von Mises on the philosophy of science

  A long thread on the Critical Rationalist facebook page began by drawing on  von Mises’s criticism of Popper in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science “he [von Mises] addressed the claim of Karl Popper that scientific propositions must be falsifiable. Although … Continue reading

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Non-justificationism: A distinction that makes a difference

When the linguistic philosophers inspired by  Ryle, Wittgenstein and Austin ruled the roost in some universities, notably Oxford, critics sometimes referred to “distinctions that don’t make a difference”. What about the distinction between justificationism and non-justificationism? A critic of Popperism in the … Continue reading

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Updating the Popper Guides and Misreading Popper

I am preparing to publish Misreading Popper and some other of my ebooks as print-on-demand paperbacks. This facility is available through a publishing associate of Amazon called CreateSpace. There are still people out there who want books to hold in their … Continue reading

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Hans-Joachim Niemann on Karl Popper, biology and evolution

A copy of Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life has arrived, courtesy of the author. This books is a fine addition to Popperian exegesis,  just when you thought the  cottage industry on the intellectual development of KRP … Continue reading

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The debacle of philosophy in the 20th century

Can philosophy progress, or is there an eternal  dialogue on fundamentals that just keeps the issues in play without resolving any of them and moving on, like the successful natural sciences?  Unlike the progress of science,  there are signs of decline in philosophy judging … Continue reading

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Topics and themes

Planning a paper version of  Reason and Imagination  I have made some minor improvements and Bruce made a major suggestion, to have a new Introduction to spell out the six themes that I have used to introduce the guides and Misreading Popper. This reminds me of … Continue reading

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Papineau on Popper

A student who is studying Popper in London  sent this paper by David Papineau for comment. His immediate task is to write a paper on induction so I will not dwell on other matters except to suggest that Popper deserves some credit … Continue reading

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Popper Symposium featuring Notturno on Hayek

There will be a Popper Symposium in Pennsylvania, September 16-18, 2014. The twentieth anniversary of Karl Popper’s death (September 17, 1994) provides a fitting occasion to reflect on Popper’s contributions to many fields of inquiry … A session of the … Continue reading

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