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“... and liberal society, between free enterprise and central planning, between (as the Austrian Karl Popper put it) the open society and what were taken to be its enemies. Many Hungarian intellectuals of that generation passed through double exile. After the 1914-18 war, and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their geographically challenged ...”

“... the telling of human history as the working-out of inexorable laws – that writers like Karl Popper judged so impoverished, historians now overwhelmingly confine themselves to knowing what they can about unique pasts, leaving unknowable futures to seers and fools. There are genres of ‘environmental history’ which project human futures on ...”

“... a permanent, necessary form to reality. He wrote, in a way which still seems bizarre to me, as if Karl Popper had never existed, had never argued in The Poverty of Historicism that the most spectacular version of essentialism in modern times was the Marxian theory of the necessary form of history. Dollimore instead assumes that everyone knows that the ...”

“... fully open to testing against the relevant empirical evidence’. The book is dedicated to Karl Popper. Mead’s account can be tested: by showing her to have failed the test, Freeman demonstrates testability itself. He can put anthropology back among the sciences. There is an uneasy homology between these two aspects of Freeman’s work. He ...”

“... it is tempting to think, should help us pin the great wriggler down. The first life of Hegel, by Karl Rosenkranz, was published in 1844. Hegel had been dead for 13 years and his intellectual legacy was a matter of dispute between ‘Right’ and ‘Left’, or, as Rosenkranz put it, between romantisch and hypermodern – between ‘aristocratic English ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s Poker, an account of the events leading up to the clash between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1946. It’s fascinating but as with all accounts of philosophy I can never get my mind round the questions at issue – Popper the general, Wittgenstein ...”

“... substantial basis for his convictions, rooted in earlier travails and a passionate conviction that Karl Popper had been right, in his view of science and philosophy as well as in the theories of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). A little later, I and many others were convoked to a seminar at which Ernest Gellner, Soros and ...”

“... to our nature and to our spectacular biological success (so far). I think the cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses ‘die in our stead’. The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them ...”

“... complete self-commitment. Lukacs’s conversion, on this view, is analogous to that of the young Karl Marx: the theorist of alienation converted to Communism under the pressure of political events. And this conversion has been assigned exemplary significance. ‘After Marx,’ Löwy suggests, ‘Lukacs is probably the most important traditional intellectual ...”

“... the EU as we like to boast (or lament).The idea of the ‘noble lie’ has an ancient parentage. Karl Popper points out in The Open Society that it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also sometimes translated. The word ...”

“... at the University of Leipzig, then in the Russian Zone and recently re-constituted as the Karl-Marx University. The following summer he and his family arrived in what had already been established as the German Democratic Republic. In his inaugural address at the university he spoke of the charts and the skills required in order to navigate ‘the ...”

“... Marianne Weber’s circle preserved the memory of Max (Elias gave a paper at her ‘salon’). Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of ...”

“... intrinsically unprogressive, concerned only to rationalise existing understandings of the world. Karl Popper’s violent assault on Hegel and Marx was one more contribution to mutual animosity. Popper’s philosophy of science is in fact Kantian, not empiricist or positivist: but this has always mattered much more to ...”

“... Plato (as philosopher, not rhetorician) here murmurs: ‘I told you so.’ Vickers shares Sir Karl Popper’s well-known distaste for the ‘lordly lie’ by which the inhabitants of Plato’s Republic are persuaded to cooperate with the eugenic policies of the élite. He objects, that is, both to the end and to the means. But the means ...”

“... told Salmagundi:In 1933 Mr [H.A.L.] Fisher, the Warden of New College, asked me to write a book on Karl Marx for the Home University Library. I said: ‘What is the audience for the book?’ He said: ‘Squash professionals.’ I had never read a line of Marx ...One sees the famous charm at work. But not even a line, by 1933, even after St ...”