ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Popper’s first book was written in the early 1930s at the urging of Herbert Feigl. Only after years of work on the manuscript, however, did Troels Eggers Hansen succeed in preparing a text for publication, a text which was then revised by Popper in 1975 and finally brought out by Mohr’s of Tübingen in 1979. The work had originally been intended to comprise two volumes, but only the first, The Problem of Induction, remained complete; of the second, The Problem of Demarcation, no more than a few fragments have survived. We know that Popper drastically reorganized this early labour, and it appeared mercilessly cut in 1934 under the title Logik der Forschung. The English translation of 1959, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, was considerably expanded with both text and appendices. In the meantime the philosopher had worked on further additions, remarks and clarifications in the expectation that they would be published twenty years after the first German edition-hence their title, Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery: After Twenty Years. But many more years were to pass before this work was eventually made available to the public, both for reasons of health and because Popper’s philosophical interests were carrying him into territory that was no longer exclusively or even mainly epistemological.
