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Concept
Karl Popper
Summary
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".
In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraced ideas from major democratic political ideologies, including libertarianism/classical liberalism, socialism/social democracy and conservatism, and attempted to reconcile them.
Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to upper-middle-class parents. All of Popper's grandparents were assimilated Jews; the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before he was born and so he received a Lutheran baptism. His father, Simon Siegmund Carl Popper (1856-1932), was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University. His mother, Jenny Schiff (1864-1938), was an accomplished pianist, of Silesian and Hungarian descent. Popper's uncle was the Austrian philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkeus. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society, as Popper's father became a partner in the law firm of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimund Grübl, and after Grübl's death in 1898 took over the business. Popper received his middle name after Raimund Grübl. (In his autobiography, Popper erroneously recalls that Grübl's first name was Carl).
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