Karl Popper

Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902 to a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Lutheranism; his father was a lawyer with a large library. He left school at sixteen, attended lectures at the University of Vienna, trained as a cabinetmaker, and worked with children and as a schoolteacher, earning a doctorate in psychology in 1928. His first book, Logik der Forschung (1934), later published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, argued that scientific theories can never be proven true, only tested, and that a theory is scientific only if some observation could show it to be false. Fearing the rise of Nazism, he left Austria in 1937 to teach in New Zealand. There he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a defense of liberal democracy that criticized the political ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx. In 1946 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he taught until he retired. He was knighted in 1965. He died in London in 1994.

Karl Popper is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born to parents of Jewish origin. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy