ABSTRACT
The idea of freedom is the core of Popper’s philosophy and he is determined to make it the ideal background of his very worldview.1 Beginning with the 1950s, Popper thinks it appropriate to insert his epistemological-as well as political-refl ections within a wider “metaphysical” framework.2 Popper’s considerations on realism, indeterminism, World 3, and the self came to constitute a specifi c and distinct phase in the development of his thought, within which his epistemological and political ideas move back, so to say, to take a secondary place. The central problem became that of cosmology, that is, as Popper declares in the 1959 preface to the revised English edition of Logik der Forschung:
the problem of understanding the world-including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world. All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it.3
