Mr. Popper's Penguins

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More than 60 years have not dated this wonderfully absurd tale--it still makes kids (and parents) laugh out loud. Poor Mr. Popper isn't exactly unhappy; he just wishes he had seen something of the world before meeting Mrs. Popper and settling down. Most of all, he wishes he had seen the Poles, and spends his spare time between house-painting jobs reading all about polar explorations. Admiral Drake, in response to Mr. Popper's fan letter, sends him a penguin; life at 432 Proudfoot Avenue is never the same again. From one penguin living in the icebox, the Popper family grows to include 12 penguins, all of whom must be fed. Thus is born "Popper's Performing Penguins, First Time on Any Stage, Direct from the South Pole." Their adventures while on tour are hilarious, with numerous slapstick moments as the penguins disrupt other acts and invade hotels. Classic chapter-a-night fun. (Ages 5 to 10) --Richard Farr

Book Description

More than 60 years have not dated this wonderfully absurd tale--itstill makes kids (and parents) laugh out loud. Poor Mr. Popper isn't exactly unhappy; he just wishes he had seen something of the world before meeting Mrs. Popper and settling down. Most of all, he wishes he had seen the Poles, and spends his spare time between house-painting jobs reading all about polar explorations. Admiral Drake, in response to Mr. Popper's fan letter, sends him a penguin; life at 432 Proudfoot Avenue is never the same again. From one penguin living in the icebox, the Popper family grows to include 12 penguins, all of whom must be fed. Thus is born "Popper's Performing Penguins, First Time on Any Stage, Direct from the South Pole." Their adventures while on tour are hilarious, with numerous slapstick moments as the penguins disrupt other acts and invade hotels. Classic chapter-a-night fun. (Ages 5 to 10) --Richard Farr

Customer Reviews:

Classic Fun.......2007-10-05

Highly recommended. My son loved it at 5, and loved it again at 7. Mr. Popper's Penguins deserves a spot on the family bookshelf. This book makes a wonderful, hilarious read aloud for the family or classroom.

Yes yes yes.......2007-09-10

Old-fashioned fun! This is a great one -- we read it aloud and we almost always are on the hook for "one more chapter" -- it has 20 chapters, so the fun keeps going. Ridiculous situations abound when a family adopts one penguin, then another... it's very fun and funny -- we read it often.

I love how my kids mimic the penguins -- "Ork" "Gook" "Awk" -- it gives me great joy when my kids connect to books.

Cinicle Recommendations.......2007-09-10

For those of you who revolve around action, adventure, humor, drama, horror, fantasy, the future, and woe, then this is defenitly not the book for you.Mr. Poppers Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater expressess how a man is given a penguin from the Antarctic, and how he ends up having eleven more and teaches them how to perform tricks to make money for his family. To start Captain Drake- an antarctic explorer-sends Mr. Popper a penguin, Captain Cook. They build an icebox for him and he tidies up their house. After about a monthe or so, Captain Cook starts to get lonely, so Mr. Popper gets him another penguin from acquarium named Greta, and they have ten more penguins! They named the penguins: Columbus, Victoria, Nelson, Jenny, Magellen, Adelina, Scott, Isabella, Ferdinand, and Louisa. Since Mr. Popper is low on money, he trains the penguins to do tricks and they perform all across the country. They go from Boston, to Seattle, to New York as Poppers Performing Penguins. You just have to read this book, and believe me, you will never have enjoyed closing a book this much.

Penguins are fun!!!!.......2007-08-04

My son (8) got this book for Christmas and he loved it. He read it several times and even took it to school for his teacher to share it with the class. She really liked it and decided to share the whole book!!!
I read it a few times as well to both of my sons and had a great time as well. Buy it!!!

Mr. Popper's Penguins.......2007-06-12

My 8-year-old daughter and I are currently reading this old book together. It was given to her as a gift last year and we are just now getting around to reading it. She has been bugging me constantly to sit down and read more (we are only about half way through). While she could easily read this book by herself we are having a wonderful time reading this charming story together. We can't wait to see what silly thing will happen next. Even though this book was published long ago, it is still a great story that is great fun.

Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach

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Good overview of 20th century philosophy of science
A Splendid intro to common-sense epistemology!
An Original, Creative Philosophy

Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
Karl R. Popper
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0198750242

Book Description

The essays in this volume represent an approach to human knowledge that has had a profound influence on many recent thinkers. Popper breaks with a traditional commonsense theory of knowledge that can be traced back to Aristotle. A realist and fallibilist, he argues closely and in simple language that scientific knowledge, once stated in human language, is no longer part of ourselves but a separate entity that grows through critical selection.

Customer Reviews:

Pretty good.......2006-04-17

Many reviewers have already put down a lot of information and advice on this book which I agree with and endorse. Karl Popper = brilliant philosopher of science, and his epistemology is pretty provocative. This book is about that epistemology.

I just wanted to point out, though, that Popper did not originate the idea of "Three Worlds" as most of the reviewers here seem to assert. He picked it up from Frege and ran with it. If you want the astounding arguments and proofs for the existence of said "Three Worlds," read "On Sense and Reference" and "Thought" by Frege--you can probably find both articles for free, online. If not, pick up virtually any anthology of analytic philosophy--they should be in there.

not good.......2003-07-01

This is a useless book, as I learnt after various re-readings of it and other philosohy of science books. The main points of the first chapter (on the problem of induction) have been long ago refuted by "the scourge of popperian deductivism", the great American philosopher Adolf Grünbaum. Popper's purported "solution" to the problem of induction is not taken seriously by professional philosophers (not to mention inductive logicians like Gaifman et. al.). The impression that one gets in the first (and last) reading of this chapter is the same as Schrödinger's, who said after reading Popper's Logik der Forschung (as reported by Feyeraband): "He says he does something about Hume's problem - but he doesn't, he just talks, and talks, and talks, and Hume's problem is still unsolved".

One of the notions which pervade the whole book, "verisimilitude", had been defined by Popper in a seemingly unobjectionable way in the 1960s, and verisimilitude was thought by Popperians (including Popper) to be an accessible and legitimate aim of science, given that truth was seen as an important but very elusive target. Popper even tells us here (chapter 8) that with his novel definition he has rehabilitated the notion of "verisimilitude" just as Tarski had rehabilitated the notion of truth. This turned out to be a vain hope. Popper's definition of verisimilitude was shown to be completely wrong - in that two FALSE theories could not be compared with respect to their verisimilitude in Popper's sense -, and moreover, since the 1970s all the work which has been done on this topic seems to support the conclusion that verisimilitude is neither a clear nor a useful a notion. Yet Popper had maintained that "we cannot do without this idea". The consequences of this failure for Popper's account of scientific knowledge, and for this book in particular, should therefore be evident for everyone. Moreover, the negative results concerning verisimilitude were discovered after the first edition of this book had been published. The make-shift amendments in the second edition are hardly enough to improve matters.

The conception of knowledge as a Darwinian process is a nice idea, but it is rather vague and also too emphatic and one sided: knowledge also has its "Lamarckian" aspects. The story about the amoeba and Einstein (Einstein is not ESSENTIALLY more intelligent than the ameba) is funny. The production of correct answers cannot, it seems, be reduced to the sheer overproduction of hypotheses and the elimination of incorrect ones. The process of HOW some hypotheses are designed from initial data is also important - a logic of discovery, that is. Popper is not interested in this, despite the title of his classic book on scientific method - the reason being...that any process of discovery is not DEDUCTIVELY VALID!

Another curious feature of the "objective knowledge" which Popper describes is that it resides in a platonic heaven of "statements in themselves": it is a knowledge "without a knowing subject" (sic), although, curiously enough, it is somehow dependent (if I understood this platonic myth correctly) on what we humans do.

The chapter on "The aim of Science" contains a point which was made by Popper in 1949. Newton's theory does not entail Kepler's third law nor Galileo's law of falling bodies: it is actually incompatible with them. The incompatibility with Galileo's law was perhaps more well known before Popper wrote this essay than the incompatibility with Kepler's law. But the lesson which Popper derives from this, namely, that inductivism is refuted, is certainly spurious.

The chapter on clouds (inderterministic systems) and clocks (deterministic systems) is suggestive in the poetic wording and the stories, but does not add much to the debate of determinism-indeterminism. Popper believes that all systems are clouds, although some more clocklike than others. Here is an argument: the determinist thesis implies that a deaf physicist would have been be able to write Mozart's compositions just by knowing Mozart's physical state at a certain time and predicting what he would write in the pentagram; but this is absurd. Therefore determinism is wrong.

The chapter on Evolution and the tree of knowledge is all wrong. Popper's views on the (un)scientific character of evolutionary theory were shown to be wrong by scientists and philosophers alike. This time, Popper says that the only thing Darwin did was to show that evolutionary explanations "can exist", that is, "are not logically impossible" (!), and that no Darwinist has ever provided evolutionary explanations of anything at all. Later Popper admitted that his views on Darwinism were sheer mistakes, but even so the later reformulations of his views were found to be also terribly misleading and confused. What is even more curious, Popper objects to the usual definition of fitness in terms of reproduction rates on the grounds that it does not take into account that such rates might be due not to fitness but to fecundity; but his amended statistical definition of comparative fitness (A is more fit than B if its survival rate is greater and its fecundity rate is less or equal) has all the vices of every attempt to DEFINE fitness in terms of survival rates: it renders evolutionary explanations circular (A survived because fit, and A is fit because it survived).

The "Logic" part of Popper's "A realist view of Logic, Physics and History" (ch. 8) is extremely odd. He defends classical logic on sheer PRAGMATIC grounds (its utility as a canon of critical procedure), but he does not answer the question of whether there is any CORRECT logic amongst the many logics, which is the WHOLE question of "realism" about logic.

The chapter on Tarski (ch.9) is also mainly incorrect. His discussion of the problem of truth bearers in note 1 is completely muddled and rash. For instance, he says that he employs "sentence" as a synonym of "interpreted sentence OR PROPOSITION" (!). The interpretation of Tarski's theory as a theory of correspondence with FACTS is entirely arbitrary. Tarski nowhere talks about facts, but Popper speaks EVERYWHERE about them, even of "supposed" facts, of "real" facts, of "the world of facts" and what not. He also says that "Tarski's theory" allows us to define REALITY as "that with which true sentences correspond". Reality would in turn be "the set of real facts". It is needless to say that these grotesque fancies are not to be found nor suggested in Tarski's careful and precise work on truth.

There is almost nothing to be learnt from this book, and much to become confused about.

Good overview of 20th century philosophy of science.......2002-12-08

In a recent article on the relation between natural philosophy and quantum chromodynamics (the physical theory of the strong nuclear interaction), Frank Wilcek, a well-recognized researcher in elementary particle physics, included the following entertaining passage:

A man walks into a bar, takes a seat on the next-to-last stool, and spends the evening chatting up the empty stool next to him, being charming and flirtatious, as if there were a beautiful women in that empty seat. The next night, same story. And the next night, same story again. Finally the bartender can't take it any more. She asks, "Why do you keep talking to that empty stool as if there were a beautiful woman in it?".

The man answers, "I am a philosopher. Hume taught us that it's logically possible that a beautiful woman will suddenly materialize on that stool, and no one has ever refuted him. If one does appear, then obviously I'll seem very clever indeed, and I'll have the inside track with her."

"That's ridiculous", says the bartender, who happens to be a physicist. "Plenty of very attractive women come to this bar all the time. You're reasonably presentable, and extremely articulate; if you applied your charm on one of them, you might succeed".

"I thought about trying that," he replies, "but I couldn't prove it would work."

I included this passage in this review not to ridicule the work of David Hume but to emphasize that his philosophy of science is in no way troubling. The author of this book though spent most of his professional life attempting to refute the views of Hume and then justify the practice of science "objectively". In the first few paragraphs of this book, the author sounds bitter about the lack of recognition for his work on "the problem of induction", which he felt Hume had shown to have devastating consequences on the "truth" of science. The search for an objective, rational "foundation" of science has occupied the time of this author and many others, who hold to the idea that scientific knowledge needs such a foundation and the Humean challenge must be answered. To those readers who agree with the author in this regard, this book would be of interest. To those who do not, this book could possibly be read as an exercise in mental gymnastics. There are some places in the book where issues are raised that are important in fields such as artificial intelligence, but as a whole the book is typical of 20th century philosophy of science: it holds as axiomatic that scientific knowledge needs an underlying foundation.

Since I personally do not believe the David Hume has to be answered at all, a review of the author's arguments against Hume would be misplaced. Having read Hume's works in detail, and having walked away from them puzzled as to why they are considered so "formidable" or "devastating", my interest in this book was purely subjective: that of gaining insight as to why many philosophers of science are so deeply troubled by Hume's philosophy and other science skeptics. Finishing the book still left my questions unanswered in this regard, and judging by a perusal of the literature on the philosophy of science, Humean skepticism is still considered the "thing to answer". Scientific truth is still held in doubt to a large degree, and debates on it in the social and political realm usually take place in the context of religion or why creationism should be taught in the public schools.

But science needs no foundation. The game of philosophy should now be what consequences science has for philosophy. What theories of truth, of ethics, of knowledge, are possible for philosophy because of science? If this book were rewritten to reflect this attitude, its content would be very different, possibly more elaborate in its views. The avenues that science opens up in ethics, epistemology, and ontology are rich in information theory, mathematics, logic, and many other areas. Scientific and technological advances are exploding at an unprecedented rate, and no Humean challenge or backlash can stop it.....thankfully.

A Splendid intro to common-sense epistemology!.......2002-11-21

To those who've not read Popper before, I highly reccomend that you statrt now- and with this book. To those who have experienced these pages first-hand, you understand why Popper and the theories herein are so important.

As short-windedly as possible, I'd like to say how I came to read him. I had forayed into philosophy through Ayn Rand who managed to convince me- as she does so many readerss- that philosophy is a chasm between soft relativism and hard objectivism. Either one believes in absolute truth and reasons 100% ability to grasp it, she wrote, or that truth is a chimera and as such, reality is mutable. I believed her. Later though, I grew restless. Truth is out there, I supposed, but how can we guarantee that our beliefs are and will always be correct? Grudgingly, I read Popper and it all made sense.

Most are familiar with Poppers theories on demarcation and epistemology but this book goes into great detail on both in clear, enjoyable language. Truth, Popper tells us, is absolute. It is certainty that creates the dilemma. Since experience has shown us that objective reality exists, science works but does not take us the full way. Theories are superceded and what once seemed true may not tomorrow. So the ultimmate test of a theory should not be whether it can be VERIFIED- if we look for supporting evidence of a pretty good yet minorly false theory, we'll probably find it- but whehter the theory can be FALSIFIED- if we look for evidence against a pretty good yet minorly false theory, it's easier, quicker and beter to find IT. What does this mean? Reality exists, otherwise why do science- it's just our CERTAINTY of any belief that will prove elusive. This book, in its small yet powerful essays, explains, examines and defends this theory of an evolutionary approach to knowledge (i.e., science.) Popper is not Foucoult; his intention is not to destroy science but to enhance it.

If you're like me, in awe of Popper's theories, perplexed as to why more people aren't and would like to read others who give similar views, one can do no better than C.S. Pierce and John Dewey. Especially Dewey's "Quest for Certainty" which underlines the experimental process of knowledge and breaks down the false dualism of knowledge and action. Also, Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn (don't believe what Kuhn's critics, even Popper himself, says about him) have similar approaches. for a contemporaary Popperian style, read Susan Haack's "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate." Not to dissuade you from reading this first as this is the starting points, the other books are enhancements. Fall in love with science!

An Original, Creative Philosophy.......2001-12-29

When an undergraduate in college, I was mainly exposed to so called "Continental" philosophy which seems to have a tendency, to say the least, toward bosh, and to analytic philosophy which seems to have a tendency, to say the least, toward triviality, plus, since it was a Catholic college, selections from Plato, Aristotle, and medieval metaphysicians.
I could not really acclimate myself with these doctrines. It is in a sense unfortunate that I found an alternative outside my formal schooling. With Popper I found someone who is readable--I think that any intelligent general reader can understand him--original, and with an outlook congruent with natural science.
He is known for his ideas on scientific method--that science does not really "prove" theories, but creates conjectures which have rich empirical content and withstand falsification. With ideas like this, decades ago, he attacked doctrines like Marxism, and psycho-analysis. Demolishing the claims of these doctrines may seem to be no big deal today, but decades ago they were major tools of our intellecutal elites.
This book covers old ground such as his views on science but also, it seems to me, breaks new ground. A new contribution is his theory of the Three Worlds, which I think is fruitful. He also deals with the question of free will, which I sense is the weakest part of his book.
Popper distinguishes three realms or 'worlds.' World1 is the world of physical objects; World2 is the world of our subjective beliefs, thoughts, feelings; World3 is what he calls an objective world of knowledge, the objective contents of thought--the knowledge contained in books, musuems, libraries, etc.
Popper holds that most philosophers considered the object of epistemology--the theory of knowledge--to be World2. Popper argues that this is misguided. He thinks it is, to use his words, "irrelevant." The proper object for epistemology is World3. We should concern ourselves not with justifying our subjective beliefs but with objective theories--their contents, the arguments supporting them, etc.
A theory of knowledge based on World3 has some interesting ramifications. It is immune from modern relativistic attacks (this is my personal view). World2 epistemology has premises, both implicit and explicit, that make it vulnerable to relativistic attacks. World3 epistemology, instead, proceeds with the GROWTH of knowledge. Another interesting feature of World3 is that, even though it is man-made, it is autonomous. If humanity were to disappear, World3 will still be "outthere". World3 is created by individuals with certain goals, but the contents of World3 seem to have a life of its own(and this is very metaphorical). It can be used by others in different ways, it leads to new problems and solutions not considered before, etc.
Popper also deals with the problem of understanding in the humanities. There are some who hold that there is a difference between understanding in the natural sciences and understanding in the human sciences--that in fields like history, psychology, sociology, one has to understand by a method which seems to me to be something like a mystical intuitive grasp of the thoughts of another. Popper thinks that this is old hat. The method to, say, reconstruct a damaged ancient text is fundamentally no different from understanding regularities in nature.
Popper died not too long before the advent of the world wide web. It seems to me that Popper's ideas on the three worlds are very applicable to the world wide web. The World Wide Web would fall under the category of World3. It has an ever expanding content of knowledge, of conjectures, of arguments and discussion. Being a part of World3, it is human made, but the world wide web has a certain autonomy. A road built on the web by one person for one thing can be used in different ways by different people.

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The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin
I LOVED this book! What a great story to read to my nephew!!
Adventure & Survival
A charming tale, sure to capture the reader's hearts from the very first page.
Pengey's Adventures

The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin
John Burns
Manufacturer: San Francisco Story Works
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0977422704
Release Date: 2005-11-01

Product Description

On a night alive with the lights of the Aurora Australis, a distant and abandoned weather station holds the only hope for a young emperor penguin who lies close to death on the most remote ice sheet in Antartica. His name is Pengey Penguin. Even though he was abandoned under the most unusual circumstances, he grew to be an adventurous spirit, undaunted by his troubles and driven by unwavering devotion to his principles and the love of Wendy, the human who saved him from certain death by starvation. Now it should be thoroughly understood that Pengey is not very tall and he is certainly not very strong, but he is very quick, extremely smart, exceedingly polite and very well mannered. This is his story, or at least how it all began. He already likes you, and it's his greatest wish that you'll like him, all his friends, and his bedtime story, too.

Customer Reviews:

The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin .......2007-04-12

Bought a copy for my granddaughter who had it read to her several times and enjoyed it so much she has since donated the book to her school library. I will replace hers with my copy since she is still a firstgrader!

I LOVED this book! What a great story to read to my nephew!!.......2007-03-14

So I just moved and my new roommate had this book sitting on the coffee table. Given that we're both single and in our 30's I had to ask what was up with the kid's book (hoping that I wasn't inadvertently offending him if it was the reading level he was at ;)) and he said the author was a friend of his and that it was a really cute book.

So, knowing nothing more than that I picked it up to read w/my Sunday coffee and couldn't put it down! What a delightful book -- even for the adult who will read it to a child (which makes all the difference when it comes to story time for exhausted parents at the end of a long day). This book belongs in the same category as the childhood classics like Beatrix Potter books, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Velveteen Rabbit, Madeline and Alice In Wonderland.

What a treasure! I can't wait to read it to my 18 month old nephew!! I really really hope there are sequels full of more fun Pengey adventures coming soon!

Adventure & Survival.......2007-02-03

After watching March of the Penguins I became fascinated with all things Penguin, especially the lovable baby emperor penguins. John Burns' book is delightful in this regard as it introduces us to a baby penguin who faces the challenge of survival in the Antartica and in places like an airport.

Pengey Penguin is quite the little character and spends some time swimming in the airport aquarium, escaping from a hungry seal and surviving being sold to a mad scientist who lives in an ominous castle on the outskirts of the city.

The mood is almost like a cartoon with Pengey, the other animals and the evil characters being the cartoon and loving humans being real. The book reads like a movie and for that reason it will appeal to adults and children. The only scene that may cause some concern for children under 5 -7 is the one with the mad scientist, but Pengey escapes unharmed.

Pengey displays bravery, survival skills, friendship, strength in adversity, creative thinking, loyalty, tenacity, kindness, love and a desire to meet goals. The book itself has a beautiful durable sapphire blue cloth binding with gold letters. The arrangement of the text allows for the book to be read more easily and the author cleverly weaves in details about real penguins. This book is the first in a trilogy with additional stories set for release in 2007 and 2009. It will be fun to follow the adventures of this adorable penguin. The pictures throughout really give this book a cute personality.

~The Rebecca Review

A charming tale, sure to capture the reader's hearts from the very first page........2006-11-06

"The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin" is a delightfully entertaining novel for readers age 5 to 95. Pengey is an inquisitive, orphaned young emperor penguin, who is rescued from the brink of death near an abandoned weather station. Courage, curiosity, and plucky determination all power his penguin heart, and he speaks his mind openly; soon, all his talents will be tested to the utmost for the sake of not only himself, but also his animal and human friends. A charming tale, sure to capture the reader's hearts from the very first page.

Pengey's Adventures.......2006-10-17

I just finished reading "The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin". The thing I liked best about this book was the relationship between the three main characters. They were each different types of birds that had to learn to work together to survive on their trip. They helped each other out of dangerous areas and had fun along the way. I think most people would enjoy this book.

Bordering on Madness: An American Land Use Tale

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Two thumbs up

Bordering on Madness: An American Land Use Tale
Andrew F. Popper
Manufacturer: Vandeplas Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1600420117
Release Date: 2006-12-22

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This book contains a story about a battle between a university and a community, providing a prime example of land use cases. The book includes a discussion guide for classroom use. To the residents of Chesapeake Commons, their backyards are perfect art, changing only in color with each passing season. When Saxton University proposes construction of a new building on the border between the university and the community, the passion for constancy and resistance to change takes violent form. As the community descends into aggressive and increasingly hostile tactics, the university responds, with equal intensity. Bordering on Madness explores the rage and fear land use disputes generate. The emotions underlying property fights are primitive, rooted in the belief that protection of property means survival. Even a reasonable proposal is experienced as a deadly threat if it seems likely to alter that most personal landscape, the home. As the land use fight in Bordering on Madness ripens, the homeowners and university become combatants. The opposition becomes the enemy, depersonalized and reprehensible. Nevertheless, as is so often the case, the struggle is a sinewy exercise in democracy, with unexpected and regular displays of intelligence and conscience.

Customer Reviews:

Two thumbs up.......2007-04-02

I read this book in two sittings. Well written and hard to put down!

The Open Society and Its Enemies: Hegel and Marx (Routledge Classics)

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Worth it for the discussion of Marxism
Philosophy of History: Prove untruth, not truth
Portrait of the Philosopher-King as an Artist
Read the free excerpt - pg 7 Plato vs Pericles
A DIFFERENT VIEW OF PLATO

The Open Society and Its Enemies: Hegel and Marx (Routledge Classics)
Popper Karl
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415278422

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Worth it for the discussion of Marxism.......2007-10-10

Popper's criticism of Marxist thought is the real payoff of the two volumes of this work. He writes with a passion that is at times overwrought - especially when teeing off against Plato and Hegel. Whether his criticism of their views is on the mark is incidental to the attack on Marx, and I leave it to the scholars of each to debate the merits of his critique. What Popper brings to the table is a clear exposition of his ideas. He makes a solid case for "social engineering" (an accurate but unfortunate term) as both a description of the past century and a prescription for addressing the problems with economic and social systems. This is a valuable and challenging book which will reward the reader willing to think through Popper's analysis.

Philosophy of History: Prove untruth, not truth.......2007-05-04

To Popper, science is a process of "conjectures and refutations"-- advancing bold conjectures about the state of the world and then trying to refute them. "Even in the study of history, objectivity should be sought in the institutions and traditions of a discipline. It is only through the give and take of open criticism and the ongoing interplay of many different kinds of biases that anything approaching objectivity will emerge." Thus, "truth" is seen as a hypothesis--you can't prove truth, you can only prove untruth. This is because one cannot know everything, therefore, nothing can be proved to be true.
Open societies, in Popper's definition, with their ideals of freedom and reason, of men who may create their own future, are opposed to the regimes of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Hegel and Marx are the main focus of the book. Aristotle built his theory on Plato; Hegel on Aristotle; Marx on Hegel. Popper is concerned with their philosophies of history. A philosophy of history is an attempt to interpret systematically the historical process by a principle that unifies the results of research and points to an "ultimate meaning" behind the process. It involves systematic reflection on scientifically derived data about the past. All the parts are unified to form a whole with "ultimate meaning."
It was thus not Marx's historicist method which led him to success, but instead the "methods of institutional analysis." In many democratic, capitalist countries production has been so great that the workers have a higher standard of living than Marx ever envisaged. He also had an unrealistic view of human nature--that because man is born good, changing his environment will bring happiness. But this view ignores the universality of human imperfection, and the sacredness of personality that is lost in the communist state.

Yet, Popper claims that Marx has done Christianity a great service by pointing out the humanitarian demands of Christ. Popper made many generalizations about Christianity without describing the basic tenets that have made Christianity "the strongest opponent of Communism." Popper does not view Christianity as being a "substitute from dreams and wish--fulfillment; it should resemble neither the holding of a ticket in a lottery, nor the holding of a policy in an insurance company." Popper opposes a "leap in the dark" of faith, whether by Marxists probing the beginning of evolution, or by those experiencing a personal relationship with God. Faith is necessary, but it is to be based on a rational understanding of the difference between belief and fact, and the appropriate place for both.

Portrait of the Philosopher-King as an Artist.......2006-08-22

When confronted with the rise of totalitarianism and the destruction of all that he held dear, Poper felt a single, overwhelming urge: to return to the Greeks, to the dawn of our civilization, so as to understand the root of the evil and to offer a practical way out of bestiality. His search was motivated by the insight that "this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth--the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society', which sets free the critical powers of man."

Heraclitus set the stage with his claim that "the cosmos, at best, is like a rubbish heap scattered at random." If "everything is in flux" and "you cannot step twice into the same river", then at least we can try to discover the historical or evolutionary laws which will enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.

Plato's claim to greatness is to have discovered such a law: that "all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration," and that the only way to break this cycle of decay is to arrest development and return to the Golden Age, where no change occurs. His belief in perfect and unchanging things, the Platonic Ideas from which all things originate, finds its expression in all fields of inquiry: be it social justice, nature and convention, wisdom and truth, or goodness and beauty.

Behind these lofty ideals, Popper uncovers a discomforting truth: Plato envisioned the ideal Greek polity as a totalitarian nightmare, where the 'race of the guardians' had to be kept pure from any miscegenation and where the role of the rulers was to breed the human cattle according to some esoteric formula (the 'Platonic Number', a number determining the True Period of the human race). Along his apology of Sparta came his endorsement of infanticide and his recommendation that children of both sexes be "brought within the sight of actual war and made to taste blood."

Popper demonstrates that these crazy ideas were not the vague mumblings of an otherwise sound philosopher: they were central tenets in Plato's philosophy, a system which has been characterized by another author as "the most savage and most profound attack upon liberal ideas which history can show."

Popper connects this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach with its aestheticism, i.e. with "the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness." Plato, the Philosopher-King, can be best characterized as an artist: a man attracted to a world of pure beauty, a craftsman who tries to visualize an ideal model of his work and to copy it faithfully, and for whom "the part has to be executed for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of the part." His desire to "start from a clean canvas" or his claim to prefer "the original to the copy" find disturbing echoes in contemporary political debates. Contrary to Plato's belief, however, the canvas can never be made clean, and the copy often improves upon the original.

Let's give Popper the last word: "But there I must protest. I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material."

Read the free excerpt - pg 7 Plato vs Pericles.......2006-03-10

Click on the book and keep clicking to page 7 - two quotes from Plato vs Pericles, which could have been written yesterday.
I may be moving and I'm busy, so no I have not read the book, but every now and then I reread that page 7 - how INSPIRING !

A DIFFERENT VIEW OF PLATO.......2005-10-30

I wish Popper were still alive because there are so FEW philosophers who can write so clearly.

Volume 1 of the Open Society is a critique of historicism and an analysis of how Plato's later thought supports totalitarianism, not democracy.

Popper presents a convincing argument about the danger of deifying philosophers of the past. He shows how some of the ideas of Plato are imbedded in our culture in ways that do not always support an Open Society, by which he means not only democracy but a society that is OPEN to learning from its mistakes and adapting to change.

If you are interested in political philosophy or the interaction of philosopy and society, this book is worth your time.

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

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Character studies, and the biography of an era
Sturm und Drang
Excellent piece of research
MORAL RULE: Thou shall not threaten visiting lecturers with fireplace pokers
Decent biographical coverage but very inadequete handling of the underlying philosophy

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
David Edmonds , and John Eidinow
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0060936649
Release Date: 2002-09-17

Book Description

On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The meeting -- which lasted ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense disagreement.

An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-siécle Vienna, Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible, larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.

Customer Reviews:

Character studies, and the biography of an era.......2007-10-10

Ludgwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper are two of the most interesting figures in 20th century philosophy. Edmonds and Eidinow use a 1946 encounter as a launching point for profiles of the two and their philosophies. It is, of necessity in a book of this length, philosophy lite. What really happened in the encounter is portrayed as a minor mystery, but in the end the differing versions tell us enough about the participants to make the truth merely incidental. Highly recommended as an introduction to both philosophers (and their era).

Sturm und Drang.......2007-08-17

In the fall of 1946, the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper had their only face-to-face encounter during an argument over the nature of the work of philosophers; the splenetic Wittgenstein used a poker from the fireplace to emphasize a point, left the room, and Popper made a sarcastic triumphal comment after he left about not waving pokers in the face of guests. This silly but revealing little contretemps is the basis for this little study of what led up to this encounter both in terms of the two famous men's remarkably similar backgrounds (they were both displaced Christianized Jews from Vienna working in England, and both were mentored by Bertrand Russell, who was also in the room) and in terms of currents in philosophy in the early twentieth century.

The book is ingeniously worked out, and you do come away from it knowing some basic ideas about what both Popper and Wittgenstein represented to European philosophy and how they both ran up against Hitler's Anschluss. The downside of the text is that it forefronts the more gossipy side of this encounter and then only towards the end getting to the content of their ideas, so that if you don't much about Anglo-Austrian philosophy you're left a bit puzzled as to why this meeting mattered until the book ends. But it's short enough a read that that doesn't present too much of a problem. This is a lightweight book, but still stimulating and worth reading.

Excellent piece of research.......2007-08-12

Having read some of the reviewers before me, I ought to warn the reader the book is more about a research of the surrounding facts of the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation than, as some of the naive reviewers seem to have expected, an in-depth account or opinion of the philosophy of both.
The book is true to its nature and in that sense it is outstanding indeed. Seldom will anyone obtain, in one piece, such a detailed portrait of two of the most outstanding intellectuals of the XX th Century. It may be curious to ascertain that these men, despite being born and educated in Austria, came to expose their differences before the english speaking world, where political tolerance has been rooted for centuries.
It is a gripping read and one that will make you re-live with passion the beautiful tradition of philosophical awe, love for logic and the un-ending quest in search for the truth.

MORAL RULE: Thou shall not threaten visiting lecturers with fireplace pokers.......2007-05-20

XXXXX

"Take a dispute fundamental to philosophy, for whose future both [exceptional] men felt personal responsibility; take the cultural, social, and political differences between [these two men]; take the obsession of one with the other, who is in turn totally self-absorbed; take their no-holds-barred style of communication; take their complex relationship with their father figure, Russell--throw all these into the caldron that was H3 and a major explosion seems to have been inevitable. The poker becomes only a fuse."

The above is found near the end of this fascinating book authored by award-winning BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow. This book has been published in over a dozen languages.

This book hinges on one small ambiguous bite-sized brouhaha that occurred in October 1946 in room H3 located in King's College (a part of Cambridge University in England). Two prominent names of 20TH century philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 to 1951) and Karl Popper (1902 to 1994) debated one another for the first and only time. (The debate was mediated by yet another prominent name in philosophy, Bertrand Russell {1872 to 1970}.) Their encounter lasted only ten minutes and, as you can surmise from the above quotation, did not go so well. Almost immediately, rumors began to spread globally and one version of the story suggested that these two had come to blows, armed with red-hot fireplace pokers.

Be aware that this is not a philosophy book even though it does contain some philosophy. The poker incident is used as a starting point or "springboard" for investigating all of the important historical events particularly in Vienna and Cambridge that shaped this incident. In other words, this story is presented in a very roundabout way, circling back to the poker incident while examining all that needs to be taken into account in fully understanding what transpired. (Some readers may not like this roundabout approach.)

As well, there is good and significant biographical detail given of Wittgenstein and Popper. One chapter is devoted to discussing Russell, "the third man" in this story.

This is a well-written book that's engaging and accessible with some humorous spots---a delight to read even if you're a non-philosopher. I found that I learned a lot, painlessly, without even noticing.

This is a surprisingly well-researched book. Information was gathered not just from books but from interviews & correspondence including eyewitnesses and those who knew one or both of these two philosophers. These people "gave their time to search their memories, offer their recollections and furnish us [the authors] with background information" and "invaluable help."

Finally, there are more than twenty illustrations in the middle of this book in the form of black and white photographs or "plates." I found that these enhanced the book's readability and enjoyment.

In conclusion, the authors of this book "make the meeting of Popper and Wittgenstein seem as fateful as that between the iceberg and the Titanic." An interesting and enjoyable read!!

(first published 2001; 23 chapters; main narrative 295 pages; Appendices: (1) chronology (of the lives of Wittgenstein and Popper) (2) "Times" literary supplement letters (where several witnesses address the poker incident); acknowledgments; sources; index)

XXXXX

Decent biographical coverage but very inadequete handling of the underlying philosophy.......2007-01-04

Nearly no insight into the actual philosophical differences that the two protagonists had. Tries to be biographical and the authors try to make feeble attempts at trying to convince that all they had were historical differences. Shows clearly that the writers are journalists and their hold over the philosophical underpinnings is negligible. A waste of time if you are looking for philosophical insights. If you are looking for a semi-biographical account of the lives of these two great philosophers, there are other books out there which serve the purpose better. In the end, it is an attempt to sensationalize what in my opinion was a minor event and comes across as quite contrived.

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper

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Confessions of a Philosopher
Very interesting journey....
The autobiographical element makes this a fascinating introduction to the history of philosophy
Entirely uninteresting
Fascinating personal journey through Wisdom

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper
Bryan Magee
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0375500286
Release Date: 1998-02-17

Amazon.com

Confessions is a somewhat misleading term in this context: you won't find any lurid tales between these covers. Bryan Magee's memoirs-cum-histories of philosophy aren't even "confessions" in the self-flagellating tradition of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

So what is Confessions of a Philosopher, then? It's a fascinating excursion through 2,000 years of wondering about the basic nature of existence and reality. As a 20th-century philosopher, Magee has a lot to say about his peers, and he spares no feelings. The "Oxford philosophers," who decided that philosophy was not about the nature of existence but about the nature of language, yet refused to give any consideration to fiction, are particular targets of Magee's intellectual scorn, while the late Karl Popper, a personal acquaintance of the author, is celebrated as a man who persevered in philosophy's true duties in the face of widespread academic frippery.

If you've ever wondered why we exist, you have what it takes to be a philosopher ... or at least to understand one. Bryan Magee's Confessions are thoroughly engaging proof that you don't need a degree to be a deep thinker.

Book Description

Already called "a masterpiece,"* this brilliant, beautifully written memoir introduces mainstream readers to all of the outstanding figures of Western philosophy.

"Until I was five I shared a bed with my sister, three years older than me. After our parents had switched out the light we would chatter away in the darkness until we fell asleep. But I could never afterwards remember falling asleep. It was always the same: one moment I was talking to my sister in the dark, and the next I was waking up in a sunlit room having been asleep all night. Yet every night there must have come a time when I stopped talking and settled down to sleep. It was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience that, and never remembered it."

In this inspiring, infectiously exciting book, Bryan Magee tells the story of his own discovery of philosophy, and makes the subject not only come alive but seem intensely relevant. He describes the fundamentals of philosophy as questions about the nature of reality encountered in the course of living, not as problems presented in the writings of the philosophers. Experiences of everyday life provoke discussions about why, through the ages, certain philosophical questions have persistently exercised our minds. Magee's memoir follows the course of his life, so that problems and philosophers are discussed in the order in which he came upon them, rather than in chronological order. By the end of the book, we have been introduced to all the great philosophers, from the pre-Socratics to those of the twentieth century, including two of the most important contemporary philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, both of whom the author knew personally.

Logically and with great fluency, Magee clarifies this sometimes obscure subject, revealing its richness to readers who may have considered it inaccessible. Intensely personal and brimming with intellectual enthusiasm, Confessions of a Philosopher is a fascinating introduction to philosophy by an outstanding writer and teacher.

"Bryan Magee from an early age has had a passion for philosophy. He has also been an MP and a renowned television broadcaster on current affairs, as well as on the history of ideas. Such breadth of experience, together with Magee's great talent for exposition, gives this autobiographical book its extraordinary wisdom, authority and impact."
--The Daily Telegraph

*Literary Review, London

Customer Reviews:

Confessions of a Philosopher.......2007-09-10

A very readable and easy way for an introduction to a many sided and complex subject, absolutely fascinating and enjoyable.

Very interesting journey...........2007-08-16

Having read Magee's outstanding book on Popper, I got interested in this "biography"...which I knew was some kind of introduction...I have found his confessions to be very interesting and if you want to say so..they apply in some aspects, mainly in what he says about his midlife crisis, not just to himself, but to a lot of us. Regarding the "introductory" part of the book..the chapters on Kant, Popper, Russell and Schopenhauer are very good indeed, and some of the explanations that he brings forward are very much to the point and very clarifying. This is due to the fact that Mr. Magee is a very good writer and I would add, very honest. The way he puts his ideas in writing are very easy to follow and to digest. Get this book if you are really interested in Philosophy...

The autobiographical element makes this a fascinating introduction to the history of philosophy.......2007-06-19

This is a fantastic book that I literally cannot put down. Bryan Magee is an Oxford and Yale educated philosopher/politician/British television personality who recounts his philosophical development throughout the whole of his life. The book deals with his formal education in college as well as his never ending search for meaning once his academic training is over. The book does not present philosophy from a historical or chronological perspective but from the first person process of actually encountering them. Magee makes it clear from the very first chapter that he actually HAD philosophical problems as a child...fundamental questions he thought about that served as the impetus for his education in philosophy. He spends several chapters criticizing the atmosphere he encountered during his many years as a student at Oxford. Oxford at the time, was the bastion of linguistic philosophy. Magee never could accept the view the the way we utilize language was the primary subject matter of philosophy, and he spends a good deal of time in the book demolishing this tradition. It is clear that Magee's chief philosophical influences are Kant, Schopenhauer and Popper. He gives considerable time to discussing the ideas of each and includes chapters on his personal relationships with Popper and Bertrand Russell. He ventures into more personal aspects of his life and his mid life crisis. In doing so, he not only recounts personal thoughts and experiences but gives overviews of numerous philosophers in doing so. The book is very clearly written and is very enjoyable to read. It is a book written by a man who has spent a life time in the study of philosophy and it clearly shows how ver, VERY well read Mr. Magee is. When he writes, you know that the knows what he is talking about. I think anyone who enjoys this book will be motivated to begin reading the classics of philosophy immediately.

Entirely uninteresting.......2007-01-07

I simply could not get over the horribly plentiful, useless detail about the author's life. The actual "blood and guts" philosophy is little and scarce. I expected an honest discussion of one's philosophical journey, but be prepared to loose interest fast rummaging through trite repetition of events of the author's life who considers himself hopelessly self important. Don't waste your time or money

Fascinating personal journey through Wisdom.......2006-11-20

Bryan Magee is a writer of several popular books on philosophy and philosophers. He has written an important study of Schopenhauer and has also appeared on television and on radio, discussing philosophy.

The 'Confessions' is Magee's personal recollections of his journey to and through philosophy. It is generally very well written and doesn't over-indulge in excessive self-introspection or pass over important ideas too quickly.

In this work Magee discusses how as a child he became fascinated with things such as the nature of time, and also quickly became an atheist. His most important philosophical influences are Kant and Schopenhauer, and a lot of the book is devoted to explaining the profound influence both philosophers had on his own thought. Magee rightly regards Kant as the most important Western philosopher since the medieval period, and laments on how obscure his work is. He finishes the work with an account of the failures of logical positivism and the fascinating aspects of continental philosophy, and the clear-headedness of Karl Popper in the face of Marxist ideaology.

The book is a fascinating journey through philosophy which shows philosophy is not really about learning ideas and view but about learning to ask questions about things with a sense of wonder. The task of philosophy is never finished as there is never a final view to which philosophy must arrive at, something Magee sees as very noble about it (and in this I agree).

At times Magee's journey shows some biases, but overall it is a good introduction to the vocation of Philosophy, and should be read along with his other introductions to the subject.

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Nilsson as a Warm, Funny, Unpretentious Woman
For the Operafile, Wagnerite or Nilssonite, this is for you!!!

La Nilsson: My Life in Opera
Birgit Nilsson , Georg Solti , and Peggy Tuller
Manufacturer: Northeastern
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1555536700

Book Description

First published to wide acclaim in Sweden (1995) and in Germany (1997), the autobiography of opera legend Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005) is finally available in an English translation. From her humble roots in rural Sweden to her artistic triumphs in Stockholm, Bayreuth, Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera House, this candid and utterly charming memoir reveals the personality behind one of the great voices of the past century.

Gracefully weaving together the private and professional, Nilsson chronicles her idyllic childhood in Vastra Karup, the early recognition of her unique natural abilities, and her first tentative steps into a wider artistic world. After achieving national acclaim in Verdi's Lady Macbeth, she went on to establish herself as the dominant Wagnerian soprano of her generation, appearing at the Bayreuth and Munich Festivals, and the Vienna and Bavarian State Opera Houses, creating, along the way, definitive performances of Sieglinde, Bruennhilde, and Isolde. The book details her rise to international stardom with behind-the-scenes recollections of her phenomenal triumph as Turandot at La Scala in 1958 and her headline-making Met premier in Tristan und Isolde the following year.

Nilsson's long and illustrious career (she performed until 1984), her celebrated professional and personal relationships, her friendships and rivalries, are all recounted with a down-to-earth wit and an engagingly odd admixture of ego and selfeffacement. She tells it all: the legendary quips, the often prickly relationships with Met impresario Rudolph Bing and conductor von Karajan, the infamous story of the stalker "Miss N," and the touchingly rendered relationship with her beloved husband, Bertil Niklasson.

What emerges from these pages is a diva in the old mold: a giant voice matched by an oversize personality, a professional who expected the same level of perfection from others that she demanded of herself, and a woman who loved and lived life with joy and good humor . . . and oh, that voice.

Includes 56 photographs and a discography.

Customer Reviews:

Nilsson as a Warm, Funny, Unpretentious Woman.......2007-09-13

This autobiography by Birgit Nilsson was originally published in Swedish in 1995 and in German two years later. This 2007 English translation of the German edition is by Doris Jung Popper, an American who was herself a former Wagnerian singer in Europe. It is for the most part in graceful, witty and seamless prose which catches the informal and down-to-earth way Nilsson spoke. We are taken from Nilsson's life as a farm girl in Sweden through her discovery locally, her schooling in Stockholm, her first breakthrough there and then internationally and her acclaim as the greatest Wagnerian soprano since Kirsten Flagstad. We get backstage stories about performances in New York, Milan, Stockholm, Vienna, London and, of course, Bayreuth. We read about her long happy marriage to Bertil Niklasson, a veterinarian. She shares funny and warm stories about her colleagues, not sparing those with whom she crossed swords -- most notably Rudolf Bing and, much more so, Herbert von Karajan, for whom she is particularly disdainful while admitting that he could draw magnificent music from his performers. She relates the details of her having to deal with her stalker, Miss N., a story well-known in opera circles but which may come as a surprise to some readers. One senses that Nilsson withholds some details in the interest of sparing the feelings of some opera world luminaries who are still with us. This reflects positively on her genuine concern for the feelings of others but might disappoint those who are looking for 'dirt.' There is a discography and a detailed chart outlining events in her life, as well as a compendious index. As well, there are over 60 black-and-white photographs from all periods of her life.

Warmly recommended.

Scott Morrison

For the Operafile, Wagnerite or Nilssonite, this is for you!!!.......2007-07-25

Nilsson writes a readable and enjoyable book about her career.

Those who have followed her will already be familiar with some of the stories but there are more details... One story she recounts which I had never heard or read anywhere was one that she tells of being pursued by a relentless stalker.

I myself worked with her professionally and can vouch for the fact that she was a warm and funny person who despite her self-assuredness onstage could express vulnerability when she was with you in a one-to-one setting. The book has moments that give the reader this sense.

She doesn't "tell all" but does "tell some" quite nicely. She was unique.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Routledge Classics)

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A philosphical classic
Very interesting
Popper's magnum opus
A philosopher's view of science
The basis of empiricism

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Routledge Classics)
Karl Popper
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415278449

Book Description

When first published in 1959, this book revolutionized contemporary thinking about science and knowledge. It remains the one of the most widely read books about science to come out of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews:

A philosphical classic.......2007-06-18

Not exactly light reading, but a great reference work, and a clear expostion of Popper's Falsificationism. This methodology is widely regarded as the leading tool for demarcating between science and non-science or pseudo-science.

Very interesting.......2006-12-24

I have to ask myself, "What is the basis for my scientific knowledge?" On a daily basis, as I am a chemist. I have often been struck by arguments for "induction" as lacking credibility, because how can one argue of probabilities with an unknown sample size? Popper argues that a proposing scientific hypothesis is an inductive act, but it is a creative act not a logical one, but that scientific knowledge is dedective.

I agree with him. The nature of science is such that one must put for statements about how the world works and test them. A scientist should always try to find a way of proving himself or herself wrong. If the predictions of the test are shown to be false, then the hypothesis must be false. That is the basis of scientific knowledge. The rest, the best theories we have are just "working models" and we can never justify why they work. They're simply our best working models now.

I don't find Popper's argument disheartening. Popper points out that we don't have to justify our search for explanations of the world, because they may do us benefit (if we happened to live in a world with stable physical laws, for instance).

I think many scientists would fundamentally agree that the laws of nature can never really be proven. They can't, but they speak volumes about what is relevant to us as a species (which is why Popper's argument that "induction" is creative is so interesting). All Popper asks of a scientific hypothesis is that it can, in principle, be demonstrated false by experience.

This is by far one of the most interesting and (I feel) important books I've ever read.

Popper's magnum opus.......2006-11-23

The Logic of Scientific Discovery is in my view Karl Popper's finest work. When I studied science I was amazed at the insight Popper had into the scientific method of inquiry, and I admired his refusal to accept intellectual garbage.

While Popper has come under strong attack from both scientists and philosophers for several shortcomings in his work, in my view Popper has framed one of the most important studies of scientific knowledge and how it is gained, and the difference between science and non-science.

I agree with Popper's argument that the key feature of scientific theories is that they are 'falsifiable.' By this Popper simply meant that a scientific theory, even if beautiful, can be shown wrong by empirical observation. While this account is no doubt oversimplified and leaves out the key social and historical dimensions to science (which thinkers such as Kuhn addressed later on), this principle remains central to science; as Feynman said, 'If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.' The fallibility of science in Popper's view was the key to its strength, in contrast to pseudo-sciences such as Marxism and Freudian psychology, which while containing elements of truth, set themselves up as infallible truths and glossed over things which contradicted the belief system.

Popper also wrote many other philosophical works, including an important study of the difference between democratic political societies and ones ruled by totalitarian ideaology. However, he rightly deserves fame as one of the most important 20th century philosophers of science.

A philosopher's view of science.......2006-09-22

In this book Popper presents two contradictory theses: (a) science can be based on deductive logic only, and there is no need for induction; (b) science cannot have a logical basis.

Because deduction yields sure knowledge if it is based on sure knowledge and induction always produces only hypothetical knowledge, as Bertrand Russell clearly stated, Popper begins by trying to show that the use of deduction instead of induction can provide a solid logical basis for science. He talks about replacing "inductivism" by "deductivism." In reality, he explains the use of deduction in the testing of a theory: consequences are deduced from the theory and are compared with known facts, which is something known by many. Induction, on the other hand, is used in creating hypotheses in both experimental and theoretical investigations and is again used in generalizing the results of tests (a) to all other possible tests in experimental investigation, and (b) also to some phenomena that cannot be used to test the theory created using the hypothesis, or hypotheses, that are produced inductively. When Popper claims that inductivism can be replaced by deductivism, he is unaware of the fact that induction is used at the beginning of both experimental and theoretical investigations to create hypotheses and again at the end of the investigation to generalize the test results.

But in the rest of the book, Popper concentrates on the generalization of test results, which is done through induction and is what he overlooked to begin with, as explained above. Consequently, Popper proves rightly that scientific knowledge cannot be produced using deductive logic, which is the opposite of what he tried to prove earlier.

The truth is that new knowledge is not a product of logic but is learned from the world about singular phenomena and is generalized through induction. Induction does not yield logically sure knowledge, but evolution created the human brain/mind so that it knows that it has to trust induction. Thus, everyone avoids hitting his or her head against hard objects by learning from past experience through induction. Someone who does not trust such inductive knowledge is punished severely. Similarly, when a scientist or an engineer does not use an accepted theory anywhere in his or her work, he or she is likely to be punished by failure and its consequences of many kinds.

Popper's views should serve to waken up those who seek the comfort of producing all knowledge through deduction only, but in fact, they shed doubt mostly on theories, because a theory is not deduced from anywhere, unlike empirical knowledge is, about some singular phenomena. A theory is constructed and tested by using induction or deduction, as necessary, at various stages of the total process on the basis of empirical knowledge. Popper's views are those of a philosopher who is not familiar with the mission and methods of science and thinks that science is about discovering something that can be called the absolute truth. Read also my evaluation of Kuhn's views.

Another erroneous idea of Popper is that theories can be falsified but cannot be verified. It is true that if a new theory is falsified by a few or even a single test, there is usually no more wish to keep testing it. But when an accepted theory is falsified by one phenomenon, it is not discarded as invalid. Its use continues where it gives good results. It is also true that a theory cannot be verified in an absolute sense, but this is true also about empirical knowledge. The generality of any knowledge is a consequence of induction which is forced upon the mind by the results of evolution, as mentioned. The verification of a theory, or any knowledge, means that it can be used where it gives useful results. Unfortunately, the impossibility of the logical or experimental validation of knowledge in a general way is seen as a weakness of only theories by those who ignore what a theory is and how it is constructed, tested, and used.

The basis of empiricism.......2006-07-06

This is a seminal work in the philosophy of empiricism. A must-read for anyone who considers themselves educated in science. Beware comments from nutcase pseudoscience shills such as "Archimedes_tritium" below ("...the foundation and original source it flows from is now identified and recognized to be fouled..."). Time and again it has been shown that science never "proves" anything; it can only show things to be false. Anyone who disputes that is whistling in the dark because he is afraid to think that we might not actually be masters of our own universe.

From Technological to Virtual Art (Leonardo Books)

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From Technological to Virtual Art (Leonardo Books)
Frank Popper
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 026216230X

Book Description

In From Technological to Virtual Art, respected historian of art and technology Frank Popper traces the development of immersive, interactive new media art from its historical antecedents through today's digital, multimedia, and networked art. Popper shows that contemporary virtual art is a further refinement of the technological art of the late twentieth century and also a departure from it. What is new about this new media art, he argues, is its humanization of technology, its emphasis on interactivity, its philosophical investigation of the real and the virtual, and its multisensory nature. He argues further that what distinguishes the artists who practice virtual art from traditional artists is their combined commitment to aesthetics and technology. Their "extra-artistic" goals -- linked to their aesthetic intentions -- concern not only science and society but also basic human needs and drives.

Defining virtual art broadly as art that allows us, through an interface with technology, to immerse ourselves in the image and interact with it, Popper identifies an aesthetic-technological logic of creation that allows artistic expression through integration with technology. After describing artistic forerunners of virtual art from 1918 to 1983 -- including art that used light, movement, and electronics -- Popper looks at contemporary new media forms and artists. He surveys works that are digital based but materialized, multimedia offline works, interactive digital installations, and multimedia online works (net art) by many artists, among them John Maeda, Jenny Holzer, Brenda Laurel, Agnes Hegedus, Stelarc, and Igor Stromajer. The biographical details included reinforce Popper's idea that technology is humanized by art. Virtual art, he argues, offers a new model for thinking about humanist values in a technological age.

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