ABSTRACT
Karl Popper is not, as yet anyway, a household name among the educated, and this fact requires explanation. For as Isaiah Berlin writes in his biography of Karl Marx (third edition 1963), Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies contains 'the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer'; and if this judgment is anywhere near sound, Popper is - in a world one third of whose inhabitants live under governments which call themselves Marxist-a figure of world importance. But quite apart from this he is regarded by many as the greatest living philosopher of science - indeed, Sir Peter Medawar, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, said on BBC Radio 3 on 28July 1972 : 'I think Popper is incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been.' Other Nobel Prize winners who have publicly acknowledged his influence on their work include Jacques Monod and Sir John Eccles, who wrote in his book Facing Reality (1970): ' ... my scientific life owes so much to my conversion in 1945, if I may call it so, to Popper's teachings on the conduct of scientific investigations .... I have endeavoured to follow Popper in the formulation and in the investigation of fundamental problems in neurobiology.' Eccles's advice to other scientists is 'to read and meditate upon Popper's writings on the philosophy of science and to adopt them as the basis of operation of one's scientific life'. Nor is it only experimental scientists who take this view. The distinguished mathematician and theoretical astronomer, Sir Hermann Bondi, has stated simply: 'There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said.' The range of
Popper's intellectual influence, unapproached by that of any English-speaking philosopher now living, extends from members of governments to art historians. In the Preface to Art and Illusion (described by Kenneth Clark as 'one of the most brilliant books on art criticism I have ever read') Sir Ernst Gombrich writes : 'I should be proud if Professor Popper's influence were to be felt everywhere in this book.' And progressive Cabinet Ministers in both of the main British political parties, for instance Anthony Crosland and Sir Edward Boyle, have been influenced by Popper in the view they take of political activity.
