Karl Popper 1902-1994

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    Birth-Death

    Karl Popper was born on 28 July 1902 and died 17 September 1994.
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    Education

    Karl Popper was born in 1902. His father Simon Popper was a doctor of law at the University of Vienna. Karl grew up with a vast home library filled with history and philosophy although his father was hesitant not to influence his thought development. (Carr, 2005) Karl enrolled at the University in 1922 and graduated with his PhD in 1928.
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    Academic Life

    After the second World War Karl Popper returned from New Zealand to the London School of Economics and studied logic and the scientific method. In 1949 he was appointed as a professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London. He retired from teaching in 1969 although he continued his intellectual work until his death in 1994.
  • Falsification

    One of the most important assertions that Karl Popper made about the scientific world was the need for falsification. This video explains many of Poppers theories, scientific and philosophical contributions, and talks about falsification
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X8Xfl0JdTQ
  • Conjectures and Refutations

    In 1963 Popper published Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. These are the tenets he proposed. (1) scientists stumble over an empirical problem; (2) a theory is proposed (conjectured) as an attempt to solve the problem; (3) the theory is tested by attempted refutations (‘error elimination’); (4) if the theory is refuted, a new theory is conjectured in order to solve the new problem; if the theory is corroborated, it is tentatively accepted. (Popper, 1963)