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“... Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great scientist, according to Kuhn, you must do revolutionary science, and the best evidence that you are doing it is that you are so obscure and inconsistent in your statements as to be wholly incomprehensible to others ...”

“... for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, ...”

“... him, for he simply used the interior of the Sheldonian as an image source, and voyaged on, with Karl Popper, as usual, his pole star, into very difficult waters: the relations of synchronic and diachronic in art history, the problems of canonicity and value. These are questions which continue to exercise him as he pays his tributes to scholars who ...”

“... of undermining the vantage-point from which the sceptic poses the question. What distinguishes Sir Karl Popper as a philosopher of science is that he accepts both the cogency of the sceptical critique of induction and the legitimacy of the scientific endeavour, and accordingly devotes himself to the Herculean task of characterising the methodology of ...”

“... by ideas brought to it by refugees. In the first wave, England got the Austrians, including Karl Popper and Otto Neurath (not to mention Wittgenstein), and later got Paul Feyerabend from Vienna and Imre Lakatos from Budapest. The United States got the Germans, including Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. The famous Vienna Circle, or Wiener ...”

“... is often difficult for them even to show their colleagues where the nub of the problem lies. Sir Karl Popper, who was 80 in 1982, is probably the philosopher outstandingly associated in the public mind with showing that such disputes do matter, that the enterprise of science, which aims to discover the truth about the universe we live in, is continually ...”

“... the only thinkers to survive Gray’s bombardment without a scratch are Michael Oakeshott and Karl Popper. Gray even pays Oakeshott the compliment of quoting him twice: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed ...”

“... time before that, but this time) it’s an irretrievable disaster. And my loved ones yawn as if Karl Popper had never lived. There’s very little leeway for temperament round here. I think of a long-ago lover who stormed out of my distracting bedroom with his manuscript under his arm, saying, ‘I have to concentrate on my work,’ leaving me ...”

“... of science, or mostly the lack of them, as perceived by great thinkers from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper and himself. His arguments are couched in largely epistemological terms which do not arouse my passions, but they stimulated me to think about those limits that affect laymen’s attitudes to science, about the practical limits scientists face in ...”

“... prewar academia there, the teenage Pocock, the son of a classicist, could observe such notables as Karl Popper and an offensive visitor from Australia, the young professor of Greek at Sydney, Enoch Powell. Trained as a historian in New Zealand and by Herbert Butterfield at Cambridge, Pocock has since the mid-1950s woven a spell over the history of early ...”

“... of Bravery, it has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick. Yet in this matter as in others the English are not as tolerant as they would like to be thought. Marxist blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s ...”

“... four of the people he classifies as Cold War liberals are discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they ...”

“... is widespread among contemporary philosophers, with some notable exceptions, such as that of Karl Popper, I myself have still not been converted to it. Koestler’s most ambitious work in the domain of the philosophy of science is The Act of Creation, which appeared in 1964. It relied very much on the all-purpose concept of ‘bisociation’, which ...”

“... to be found in The Spirit of Catholicism, a book by one of Dr Küng’s predecessors at Tübingen, Karl Adam. To blame the Catholic Church for not abandoning these conceptions in its dealings with Dr Küng is a little like chiding the Third International for not adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John ...”

“... in 1951 – in physics or philosophy, he doesn’t say precisely which – and went to study with Karl Popper, whom he’d met in 1948, at a summer school in the Tyrol. Feyerabend, to put it mildly, was highly sympathetic to Popper’s way of thinking: here was an acceptable way of denigrating the sciences. ‘It had ...”