Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science and political theorist born on July 28, 1902, in Vienna. The son of a prosperous Jewish-Austrian lawyer and a musical mother, he grew up in a household stocked with books and converted, with his parents, to Lutheranism before his birth. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1928 and qualified as a secondary-school teacher of mathematics and physics.

His 1934 German-language treatise Logik der Forschung — published in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery — argued that scientific theories cannot be verified by accumulated evidence but only tentatively corroborated, and that what distinguishes scientific from non-scientific claims is falsifiability: the willingness to specify what observation would refute them.

Fleeing the Nazi annexation of Austria, he took a lectureship at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1937. There he wrote his great political work The Open Society and Its Enemies, a two-volume attack on the historicist totalitarianisms he traced back through Hegel and Marx to Plato; it appeared in 1945 along with the related essay The Poverty of Historicism.

In 1946 Friedrich Hayek brought him to the London School of Economics, where he was appointed Reader in Logic and Scientific Method and, in 1949, Professor. He was knighted in 1965 and made a Companion of Honour in 1982. Later books included Conjectures and Refutations, Objective Knowledge, and The Self and Its Brain, written with neuroscientist John Eccles. He died on September 17, 1994, in London.

Karl is a masculine Germanic name from the Old High German karl meaning free man, cognate with the English Charles. He carried the masculine name throughout his life.