Karl Popper 1902 – 1994

Karl Popper was a 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher of science, social philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers of the analytic tradition. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, originally published in German in 1934, argued that scientific theories cannot be verified but can be falsified, and that falsifiability is the criterion that distinguishes empirical science from non-science. The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during the Second World War, defended liberal democracy and analytical critique against the historicism he found in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. He also articulated the paradox of tolerance, the principle that an open society must be intolerant of intolerance to survive. Knighted in 1965, he taught for most of his career at the London School of Economics.