KARL RAIMUND POPPER & THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE

Karl Popper

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Karl Popper, one of her favourite philosophers, who was born on a day like today in 1902. Our societies are empty of Philosophy and full of Economics. All themes turn around money and human relationships seem to be less important when, in fact, they are the most valuable.

In a current world, where racism, xenophobia and untolerance are rising up without control, we need to read and reread Popper's works to understand us and to fight against these untolerance attitudes, sometimes accepted, in the name of tolerance. This is the base of the Paradox of Popper.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902-17 September 1994) was an Austrian philosopher and professor.

Generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification.

A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinised by decisive experiments. Popper is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy.

In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraces ideas from all major democratic political ideologies and attempts to reconcile them, namely socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism.

Karl Popper

Karl Popper was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary, in 1902 to upper-middle-class parents. All of Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but they were not devout and as part of the cultural assimilation process the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before he was born and so he received a Lutheran baptism.

Popper left school at the age of 16 and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and the history of music as a guest student at the University of Vienna.

In 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology. After the street battle in the Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919, when police shot eight of his unarmed party comrades, he became disillusioned by what he saw as the pseudo-scientific historical materialism of Marx, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life.

In 1928, he earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler. His dissertation was titled Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie, On Questions of Method in the Psychology of Thinking.

More information: Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In 1929, he obtained the authorisation to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school, which he started doing. He married his colleague Josefine Anna Henninger (1906–1985) in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss, he started to use the evenings and the nights to write his first book Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge. He needed to publish one to get some academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent. However, he ended up not publishing the two-volume work, but a condensed version of it with some new material, Logik der Forschung, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in 1934. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductivism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability as the criterion demarcating science from non-science.

In 1935 and 1936, he took unpaid leave to go to the United Kingdom for a study visit.

In 1937, Popper finally managed to get a position that allowed him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society and Its Enemies. 

Karl Popper

In Dunedin he met the Professor of Physiology John Carew Eccles and formed a lifelong friendship with him. 

In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to the United Kingdom to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Three years later, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London. Popper was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active for the rest of his life.

In 1985, he returned to Austria so that his wife could have her relatives around her during the last months of her life; she died in November that year. After the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft failed to establish him as the director of a newly founded branch researching the philosophy of science, he went back again to the United Kingdom in 1986, settling in Kenley, Surrey.

Popper died of complications of cancer, pneumonia and kidney failure in Kenley at the age of 92 on 17 September 1994. He had been working continuously on his philosophy until two weeks before, when he suddenly fell terminally ill. After cremation, his ashes were taken to Vienna and buried at Lainzer cemetery adjacent to the ORF Centre, where his wife Josefine Anna Popper, called Hennie, had already been buried.

More information: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Popper's estate is managed by his secretary and personal assistant Melitta Mew and her husband Raymond. Popper's manuscripts went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, partly during his lifetime and partly as supplementary material after his death. Klagenfurt University has Popper's library, including his precious bibliophilia, as well as hard copies of the original Hoover material and microfilms of the supplementary material. The remaining parts of the estate were mostly transferred to The Karl Popper Charitable Trust. In October 2008 Klagenfurt University acquired the copyrights from the estate.

Popper and his wife had chosen not to have children because of the circumstances of war in the early years of their marriage. Popper commented that this was perhaps a cowardly but in a way a right decision.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the Open Society.

Karl Popper

Popper considered historicism to be the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end.

He argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

He also argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge, it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.

In 1947, Popper co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, with Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and others, although he did not fully agree with the think tank's charter and ideology. Specifically, he unsuccessfully recommended that socialists should be invited to participate, and that emphasis should be put on a hierarchy of humanitarian values rather than advocacy of a free market as envisioned by classical liberalism.

  

Download The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

Karl Popper first described it in 1945 -expressing the seemingly paradoxical idea that, In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.

The paradox of tolerance is important concept for thinking about which boundaries can or should be set on freedom of speech. 

Popper asserted that to allow freedom of speech to those who would use it to eliminate the very principle upon which they rely is paradoxical.

Popper helped to establish the philosophy of science as an autonomous discipline within philosophy, through his own prolific and influential works, and also through his influence on his own contemporaries and students.

Popper founded in 1946 the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and there lectured and influenced both Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, two of the foremost philosophers of science in the next generation of philosophy of science.

Download Science and Enlightenment by Karl Popper

There is no history of mankind, 

there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. 

And one of these is the history of political power. 

This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Popper