Blackwell Reference Online

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Born in Vienna, Karl Popper studied at the University of Vienna from 1918 to 1922, after which he became apprenticed to a master cabinetmaker, Adalbert Posch. In his intellectual autobiography, Popper reported that he learned more about epistemology from Posch than from any other of his teachers. In 1925 he enrolled in the City of Vienna's new Pedagogic Institute to work on the psychology of thought and discovery. However, his interests turned to methodology and in 1928 he obtained his doctorate for a thesis on methodological problems in psychology. While teaching mathematics and physics in a secondary school he wrote his Logik der Forschung , which was published in 1934, appearing in an English translation in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery . In 1937 he went to New Zealand as a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College. While there he wrote his influential works The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies . Appointed Reader and subsequently Professor in Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics in 1946 he remained there for the balance of his academic career. Until his death in 1994 he continued to publish prolifically. The distinctive feature of Popper's philosophy of science is his attitude to induction. Like Hume he held that no inductive inference is ever rationally justified. Finding that 1 million randomly ... log in or subscribe to read full text