I am a long-time Karl Popper fan. I've read all but, I believe, 4 books of his. To my knowledge, this is his shortest at 161 pages - all consisting of essays. This is also the book of his that is the least original. If you're a long-time fan, you've read these ideas before. If you are a newcomer, there are better books to start with.

For all that, the first essay, "The Logic and Evolution of Scientific Theory" is the best short summary of Popper's views on science that I've read. The second essay is also a good summary of Popper's theories of body/mind interactionism, an odd position for a modern theoriest to hold.

The second half, although quite unoriginal (I've started to realize that Popper's views on freedom, democracy, open society, etc. were better expressed by James Madison)is still quite interesting. Also, this book, I'm quite sure for the first time, gives us Popper's views towards international policy. 'Waging Wars for Peace', an excerpt from a radio interview, is pretty timely in 2003 and reminds us that there can be no thing as an absolute pacifist. Not destroying someone certain to kill only postpones. The title essay, at 6 pages, is another timely celebration of technology; timely because many on the right and left (for different reasons about different techonologies) are preaching against technologies while failing to see the many good sides.

All in all, a quick and fairly worthwhile read. The experienced reader of Popper, again, will find nothing new here. [...]

This book is a collection of 15 lectures/speeches/interviews that Popper gave at various points throughout his career (earliest 1958, latest 1994). They are organized into two sections (1) those related to natural science and (2) those related to history and politics. The first section relates to theory of science and knowledge in an evolutionary context with the process of problem solving at the core. In the second section Popper addresses problem solving more generally ("all life is problem solving") and shares his thoughts on subjects such as war, peace, communism, and interpretation of history.

This book has the weaknesses and strengths that you would expect from a work not originally intended to be published in written form. The benefits are that the chapters are fairly brief and easy to read. Also, Popper's style is nearly anti-academic as he tries almost too hard to simplify the material in order to make it understandable to all. The primary drawbacks are that the book can't be well organized and there are significant repetition and overlap in ideas. Additionally, the book doesn't provide the level of detail that one normally expects in a book by a major thinker.

This is the first book of Popper's that I've read. I became interested in his work by being briefly introduced to some of his thinking from other authors. This book did not provide enough detail to satisfy my interest in Popper, but it served to confirm to me that he is a first rate thinker and that his other works should be near the top of my reading list. I especially enjoyed the surprise of reading Popper's thoughts on Saddam Hussein and the threat of nuclear weapons - highly relevant to our situation today (early 2003). There is no doubt where Popper would stand on the current debate about Iraq.

So this is a good book to get a taste of Popper or maybe for a quick review of some of his thinking if you are already familiar with him. However, this isn't the best book for studying Popper's ideas in detail.

David Stove has posthumously achieved celebrity status with this book. This status is not well earned because Stove and his claque have completely missed the point of Popper's philosophy and the way that it has sidelined the long-running and pointless academic obsession with knowledge as "justified true belief".

Popper has provided a viable alternative to the "justified true belief" theory of knowledge. He has propounded a theory of conjectural objective knowledge which grows by conjecture and criticism of various kinds, including the criticism of empirical tests. This is a matter of commonsense and it is not hard to explain to scientists and other practical people who have not had their brains addled by academic philosophy and its fruitless quest for the non-achievable - verified theories or "truly justified beliefs" or merely theories with a specified numerical probability. Those, like Stove, who think that inductive probabilities can be assigned to theories, have yet to provide the formula after some centuries of effort.

The fruitless and boring quest for inductive probabilities has driven many students from the pursuit of rationalist philosophy in search of more interesting and exciting fare, hence the rise of the deconstructionists and post-modernists and other related fads and cults. Stove and others have blamed this tendency on Popper's "irrationalism" but this is precisely the reverse of the true situation. It is the failure of the positivists and the inductivists to deliver the magic formula which has wrecked their credibility.

Popper has provided the antidote to irrationalism but he has been so thoroughly sidelined in academic philosophy that students can only find out about his ideas by accident, apart from the garbled and miseading misconceptions of his thoughts that are perpetuated by his opponents.

For a more enlightening introduction to Popper's ideas, in the context of the main postwar philosophical developments, read Bryan Magee "Confession of a Philosopher".

Stove takes the four most widely recognized and celebrated philosophers of science (plus David Hume), and treats them to some "naive commonsense" criticism. This book will appeal to anyone who has never studied philosophy and who would also like to see those who have studied philosophy, put in their place.

Unfortunately, Stove completely misses the points of the opposing philosophical positions. Everybody is marching out of step except for Mr. Stove? I think not. But,then please read the counter arguments by Popper, or Lakatos, or Kuhn or Feyerabend, or Hume and compare those competing arguments to Stove's, . . . decide for yourself. Hume for instance, is brushed aside with a simple, "logic is more than deduction." I cannot recommend this book.

Stove starts this book by observing that a philosophy of science which implicitly denies any possibility of the accumulation of knowledge, while giving birth to a misbegotten relativism, must appear very implausible (naturally this is a trivial point to the philosophically sophisticated). How, Stove persists in asking, could such a thing have been made 'acceptable to readers who would reject it out of hand if it were presented to them without equivocation?' Then he shows how, with Helps to Young Authors on how to denature language and sabotage logic 'after the manner of the best authorities'. This part is dedicated to George Orwell. Read it, and 'scare' quotes will never 'look' the 'same' again. The great and good were not amused. Sir Karl an irrationalist? the sainted Thomas an obfuscator? It's true Stove can be unfair, and many will think that not all four of his bogeymen - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend - are equally culpable. Nevertheless, they have more in common than you might think. According to Stove they have good reason, or rather unreason, to write that way. (But for a Popperian rejoinder, see the next review.)

The second half of the book traces modern irrationalism back (insofar as it has an intellectual origin in the Anglo-Saxon tradition) to an unacknowledged premise of Hume's inductive skepticism. Whether that premise can bear the weight that rests on it is debatable. To follow the argument you won't need any great knowledge of analytic philosophy, but it may take some mental effort. Don't let that stop you; when Stove is being serious he's a master expositor. Far from being the Idiot's Guide to inductivism, this part is as demanding as anything in Kuhn or Feyerabend, only much better written. Remember, when you read some of the other reviews, that Stove treats Hume with the highest respect.

Taking the book as a whole, it seems that readers either like it or loathe it. Apart from the obvious consideration that people don't like having their idols smashed, the probable reason is that Stove writes with too much clarity, wit and forthrightness for postmodern sensibilities. If you think, as some do, that the ponderous perverseness of Feyerabend's 'Against Method' is 'fun' and 'humorous', you won't appreciate this at all.

Twenty years on, a kind of academic shanty-town sprawls on foundations of make-believe, for which at least some of Stove's 'four irrationalists' inspired the architecture and signed the building permit (they claimed later it was forged). To question the wisdom of this development is 'naive'; one must be 'half-educated' or 'an unwitting positivist' - witness reactions to Sokal & Bricmont's critique, or the ecstatic reviews still surfacing on Kuhn's 'Structure'. (To be fair, some of the latter enthusiasts may not have understood the implications. One reader even persuades himself that Kuhn's ideas lend support to hard-core creationism. Kuhn is all things to all men.) Is it just a strangely persistent fad rooted in muddle, or a symptom of a deeper sickness? Some say that one Stove was enough; I think we need an Aga.

"This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise" - Bertrand Russell.

For a while now, I've been a big fan of Karl Popper and it's good to see that his work is getting some (not all) of the attention it deserves. This book, while far from comprehensive, is a decent addition to any student of Popper and while explanatory, is far from an uncritical exposition.

As Mr. Champion below pointed out, this book has a 'top down' theory. Wheras it is generally assumed that Popper's epistemology and metaphysical theories are the foundation on which his political (and metaethical for that matter) philosophy rests, Stokes sees it the other way round. This actually makes a bit more sense to me as his political and epistemological theory are only somewhat cohesive with eachother. Pointed out are things like Popper's instrumentalism in politics in contrast to his 'knowledge for its own sake' epistemology. (I was glad to hear John Dewey's name mentioned here as any Popper reader would be wise to get into JD). Also the dualism held between objective fact and subjective value is pointed out (mainly because Popper never offers a satisfactory bridge between the two).

Stokes seems to very much like Popper's political thought while still calling falsifiability into question as an exclusive demarcation between science and non. (He correctly mentions Feyerabend's quip that too many scientific theories later deemed accurate were initially falisfied.) In fact, I think it's safe to say that Stokes, while laying out Popper's philosophy accurately albeit hurriedly, ends up with ambivolence. Every philosophy has holes, no philosopher has thought of everything or wiped out every contradiction in their work. This book should help the next generation understand, examine, and strengthen Popper's critical rationalism.

Stokes has provided a well-written report on a wide range of Popper's work, though in order to keep the task within reasonable bounds he has not attempted to treat quantum theory or Popper's technical work in logic and probability. The book addresses, in turn, Popper's project (problem and method); falsification and its critics; the politics of critical rationalism; the methodology of social science; metaphysics and freedom; evolutionary epistemology; and critical rationalism and critical theory (an engagement with the Frankfurt School). The aim is to indicate the key intellectual components and priorities in his thought, to show how they form a complex whole, and how they lead to certain problems and inconsistencies.

Stokes is especially interested in the relationship between Popper's views on scientific methodology and his politics. This approach has enabled him to locate some important points that are often overlooked, such as Popper's concern about the political consequences of the 'manifest truth' epistemologies of Bacon and Descartes. The consequences that concerned Popper were the fanaticism and intolerance of those who believed that important truths of were self-evident to those who adopted the correct approach (the correct authority or the correct methodology), so that any deviation from those truths could be attributed to wickedness or bad faith.

Stokes has also identified some problems that have not received adequate attention from Popper's supporters. These include some awkward comments by Popper on the need for a little dogmatism to maintain a theory in its early stages, ambiguity about which proposition or propositions have actually been refuted in the event of experimental falsification (the Duhem-Quine problem), difficulties with methodological individualism and uncertainty about the precise nature of Popper's social and political liberalism.

Such a large number of complex and controversial issues are touched in the book that most readers are likely to feel that their special area of interest has not been given adequate coverage. A major concern in this regard is the lack of development of some of Popper's central ideas. An obvious example is Popper's non-authoritarian stance in epistemology and politics, where it would be helpful to have an explanation of the logic of Popper's arguments against the demand for decisive justification of theories and the political counterpart of this stance, namely his critique of all doctrines of unlimited political power. In the political domain this led to his suggestion that the fundamental problem in democratic politics is not "who shall rule" but instead "how can we design institutions to ensure that even incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?".

Another shortcoming is the neglect of a number of people who have applied and developed Popper's ideas in interesting and important ways. These include Bartley on rationality and the limits of criticism, Jarvie on the application of objective knowledge to the task of explanation in the social sciences in "Concepts and Society" and Munz on evolutionary epistemology as an alternative to the "mirror" theories of positivism and the "lamp" theories of Wittgenstein and Rorty in "Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein?".
In addition to noting those omissions (and some other neglected opportunities) I would like to make two main points. First, more attention to Bartley's development of Popper's ideas might relieve some of the tensions in Popper's epistemology and in the project of critical rationalism generally. Second, following Shearmur in "The Political Thought of Karl Popper" it is most likely that Popper's social philosophy can be located close to the classical or market liberalism of Hayek.

Stokes picked up Popper's comments on the authoritarian strand in the traditional epistemologies, and he noted Popper's concern at some of the likely political consequences, notably fanaticism and intolerance. However he did not attempt to unpack the institutional consequences of Popper's critique of sovereignty, or of Popper's critique of the Platonic notion that individualism and altruism are inevitably opposing tendencies. A revised view on sovereignty along with some development of Popper's critical views on self determination for various religious, cultural or racial groups would appear to offer an avenue to deal with the problem of dissident minorities, short of attempts to redraw the boundaries of nation states, war and genocide.

Given the many controversial aspects of Popper's thought, most people will find plenty to disagree with, both in the primary works and in Stokes's interpretation of them. In case the comments above appear ungenerous I had better close by saying that it is gratifying to note that Stokes has been prepared to put so much time and effort into the work of a thinker who is not widely regarded in philosophical circles as a living influence or a significant force. Those who beg to differ will be pleased that Stokes has kept Popper's ideas "in play", at least for the time being.

I've always found Karl Popper's writing clear and understandable. This 'introduction', though apparently written in english, is neither.

This is a fine book which details Popper's final thoughts on all of his theories, and the long road that led him there. Everything is well coordinated with cross-referenced citations for all of his major works and trends.

I would give it 5 stars, but as Popper would be the first to acknowledge, there is always room for improvement!

Douglas Williams of the Department of Political Studies at Queens University in Kingston (Canada) has written a wide-ranging account of Popper's thought with the emphasis on the social and political aspects of his ideas. The intention of the author was to draw out both the strengths and limitations of Popper's work from the perspective of a critical admirer. This stance has enabled him to identify some aspects of Popper's work that are generally neglected, especially the moral dimension of his thought which Williams regards as a pervasive unifying principle. He also notes that virtually nothing has been written about Popper's defence of the cultural ideals of Western society and a major aim of the book is to show "the sustaining unity and power of Popper's vision" as it runs through his work in cosmology, philosophy, science, history and politics.

Despite these promising indications, the results are disappointing. This is not because Williams dissents radically from many salient features of Popper's philosophy. These disagreements, from a professed admirer of Popper's achievement, should be challenging and illuminating. The problem is that Williams does not provide the arguments and the evidence that are required to make his objections convincing, or to drive the discussion to a deeper level. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies abound. What is one to make of an author who on page 164 rebukes Popper for his 'failure to apppreciate the ideal of the good life in a free and egalitarian society', having previously (p 15) quoted from Popper's Unended Quest 'For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society...'?

Williams comments that Popperian exegesis has polarised between disciples and vehement critics. It appears that he has achieved a balance of a kind by occupying each extreme in turn. In one mode he writes:
'During the last four decades, and spanning a seemingly endless number of fields of inquiry, Popper has established himself as one of the most significant thinkers of our century...Few thinkers in our century have possessed the intellectual powers, the courage, and the faith in humanity necessary to sustain such a project. Bertrand Russell is perhaps the last that comes to mind'(viii).

In the critical mode he raises myriad objections, large and small, to Popper's psychology, his epistemology, and his politics, concluding that some of Popper's ideas, especially his concept of rationality, are not consistent with the maintenance of human freedom and autonomy.

Williams digs deep to locate the roots of Popper's ideas. He suggests that Popper followed Kant's defence of human dignity and moral autonomy against the twin threats of mechanistic determinism (Newton) and skepticism (Hume.) This is a fertile formulation that could have led directly to an account of Popper's responses to these threats, namely indeterminism, fallibilism, a non-authoritarian theory of knowledge and a limited 'non-justificationist' theory of rationality. Instead, Williams embarks on an account of the rise of science and the battle to maintain a sense of enchantment in a culture of science and technocratic politics. The remaining chapters examine Popper's methodology for the natural sciences (Chapter 4), his prescriptions for the social sciences (Chapter 5) and his defence of liberalism (Chapter 7 and Chapter 8). Chapter 6 defends Mannheim from some Popperian criticism.

One of Williams's problems is that he has tried to achieve too much in 200 pages. This tendency is especially apparent in Chapter 4, where in less than thirty pages he covers the development of most of Popper's leading ideas in epistemology and the philosophy of science. This is too densely packed for an introduction and it is likely to confuse people who come to the book in search of Popper's social philosophy. At the end of the chapter Williams changes from the descriptive to the critical mode and delivers an essentially negative verdict on Popper's psychology and also his epistemology.

In Williams' conclusion, he wrote that his aim was to faithfully reconstruct the unity of Popper's vision by pursuing an 'immanent critique'. That is, 'criticism of a man or woman's thought is held to flow from his or her own assumptions and values' (185). He wanted to improve on the excessively specialised and polemical nature of most of the commentary on Popper's work. This is a worthy aim but not one that Williams achieved, possibly because he did not make use of Bartley's account of the 'metacontextual shift' generated by Popper's non-authoritarian theory of knowledge and politics. Consequently Williams has been unable to do justice to Popper's epistemology and its cultural implications.

A similar problem has apparently occurred with Williams' critique of Popper's politics, especially Popper's views on the limited, protective role of the state. Williams has promulgated some very misleading statements, on Popper's views about the role of technocrats and social engineering, for example. This is a situation where the imminent critique may need to be supplemented by an account of Williams' own assumptions and values because they have apparently influenced his adverse comments on Popper.

The result is a book containing a confusing mixture of praise and criticism. If the criticisms were valid, Williams' high opinion of Popper would appear to be unwarranted. For the most part they are not valid, and one wonders how some of the more spectacular misreadings survived the screening of all the helpers he acknowledged. One also wonders what kind of impression this book will make on people who have not read Popper. Clearly the best thing that can happen will be for people to read some of the books and make up their own minds on the problems and issues raised by Williams.

The author conceives philosophy in a Wittgensteinian way, that logic and mathematics are like the rules of the "game of chess" of Philosophy, and he wants to offer a proof that an epistemological paradigm (which is represented by Fregean Platonism) has been substituted gradually by another one (which is represented by Popper and Kuhn).

The author with or without knowing it distorts Frege's philosophy. First, he does so by misunderstanding Frege's view. Notturno thinks that Frege states that logical laws are "the laws of thought". He quotes that from Frege's "Der Gedanke". There are two problems with this. First of all, when Frege talks about "logic being the laws of thinking" (because he is refering to the psychological laws of thinking), he is refering to other people who hold this view, he is not talking about himself holding this belief. Also, by mistranslating "thinking" for "thought", the reader can easily be confused and believe Frege held that the sense of a sentence is a psychological thought, and that logic is normative in nature (pp. 22-32).

This leads us to a second problem: contrary to what the author states, Frege didn't hold logic as normative in nature. Frege distinguished in his "Basic Laws of Arithmetic" and in his "Der Gedanke" that there is a difference between laws of *being* true, and laws *being held* as true. Logical laws deal only with the laws of being true (I'm practically quoting Frege from his essay "Der Gedanke"). For Frege the objective order of third realm entities is the justification for the normative side of logic. This mistake made by Notturno permeates the entire book.

There is another confusion about Frege. He, along with other authors like Hans Sluga and company, holds that Frege was a logicist because of epistemological considerations. This is not true, his main focus was in philosophy of mathematics, his whole program was to establish logic being the basis for arithmetic. His dealings with the notions of function, concept, object, sense and reference, are precisely defined so that they serve as the theoretical basis for his whole logicist enterprise.

Obviously, with these confusions, in Notturno's book, Frege's notion of logic is not that different of some varieties of psychologism, and in the end he would "prove" the paradigm shift. For him Frege, along with Popper, would fail in his anti-psychologism. But in reality, all he does in his book is prove the existence of two paradigms, nothing more. He can't prove that the platonistic paradigm has been overcome by psychologism, because even in Frege's time psychologism was very popular... and then today, many of the best philosophers of mathematics are platonists. I even miss Husserl's comments of his "Prolegomena of Pure Logic" which should make all of the Platonistic notions in the Platonist paradigm clearer. This might have prevented Notturno from taking Platonism as a weaker form of psychologism and would have distinguished between theoretical logic (laws of what *is*) and normative logic (laws of what *ough* to be). The latter is based on the former, not the other way around.

I think also that what he states at the very end of his book is ridicolous: that philosophy exists not to take things seriously but to "have fun" (p. 233).

Finally, Notturno apparently refers to God as a third realm object, characteristic of the former paradigm (pp. 3, 21), and that through philosophy he learned that God doesn't exist (p. ix). If through this book he wanted to prove the non-existence of God, he wasted his time. For Platonists, like Frege, logical and mathematical laws don't depend on God's existence.

For a more complete critique of his book. The reader is invited to see my comments on it on my site:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Bridge/5475/Philosophy/Notturno.htm