Karl Popper
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.
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