Popper, Karl (1902–1994)

Life and Career

Popper was born in Vienna, Austria, to middle-class parents of Jewish descent, and he completed his doctorate on the psychology of learning at the University of Vienna in 1928. He worked for a time as a schoolteacher but was also an active participant in the vibrant intellectual life for which Vienna was then world famous. Popper was greatly influenced by some of the most prominent figures in science, psychology, and philosophy at the time, including Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Alfred Adler, and Albert Einstein. He also greatly admired the famous Vienna Circle of logical posi-tivists that formed around Moritz Schlick when he was appointed professor of the philosophy of inductive sciences at the University of Vienna in 1922. However, Popper was never offered membership in the intellectually prestigious circle, something he undoubtedly coveted, and he became increasingly critical of both the aims and methods of logical positivism. In later years, Popper was to claim that he had been responsible for the death of the movement.

The rise of Nazism led Popper to emigrate to New Zealand in 1937 for a position at Canterbury University College, and while residing there he published The Open Society and Its Enemies. He returned to Europe in 1946 to teach at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method in 1949. From there he exerted a very significant influence on the subsequent development of the philosophy of science, particularly after the publication of The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), which brought Popper's innovative ideas on the nature of scientific knowledge into prominence.

Short in stature, Popper was a brilliant but at times rather vain and pugnacious thinker whose principal concern was with the nature of human rationality as it manifests itself in science and in political life. In Britain, as in Vienna, he found himself largely relegated to the periphery of a philosophical movement (usually termed analytic philosophy) dominated by the figure of fellow Austrian émigré Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Popper met only once but whom he viewed, nonetheless, as his life-long nemesis.

Popper served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959 and was the recipient of many honors, including a knighthood, Fellowships from the Royal Society and the British Academy, the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold, the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, and the Sonning Prize for merit in work that had furthered European civilization. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained influential and intellectually active until his death in 1994.

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