Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FBA FRS (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and professor. He is generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science. Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. Popper is also known for his opposition 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 came to believe made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraces ideas from all major democratic political ideologies and attempts to reconcile them: socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism. 2Personal life 3Family and training Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish but were not devout, and as part of the cultural assimilation process, the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born, and so he received Lutheran baptism. Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. Karl 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: Simon Siegmund Carl became a partner in the law firm of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimund Grübl and, after Grübl's death in 1898, Simon took over the busines