Popper, Karl (1902–1994)

Karl Popper, an eminent philosopher and social theorist, was born in Vienna, but subsequently became a British subject. When young, Popper was intellectually precocious and had a keen interest in science, psychology, and, subsequently, philosophy. He became interested in socialism when in his mid-teens, and he briefly flirted with Marxism, working as a volunteer in the offices of the Austrian Communist Party. He soon abandoned his early socialist sympathies and became immersed in more purely philosophical questions, during which he developed a particular interest in what characterized scientific knowledge. Popper was influenced by the psychologists Karl Buehler and Otto Selz and by a distinctive kind of Kantianism favored by the German philosopher Leonard Nelson. His interest in science in part reflected the concerns of the ...