[lit-ideas] Re: The continued mistreatment of Karl Popper by academics
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:17:39 -0800
Donal asks (perhaps with good reason)
Is there any philosopher of Popper’s standing who has had his work so
poorly treated by academic philosophers, either by their
misrepresenting it or writing as if in ignorance of it? What steps
might improve this (frankly disgraceful) situation? These questions
surface from time to time and a recent look at the /The Shorter
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy/ [‘/Routledge/’, 2005] provokes
them again.
I don't know as much about Popper or his work as Donal does. (This is or
course a truism, for I know little and he knows a lot.) I wonder though
if Popper has been as ill-served by 'academic' philosophers as Donal
suggests. It's one thing to ignore a philosopher's work; it's another to
try understand it and get it wrong: the latter failed enterprise
constitutes the history of Western philosophy.
That is: in terms of attention paid to a philosopher's work, Popper does
not come off at all badly; in terms of its being understood, he does.
Misrepresenting something is an intentional act. Being dense—although
sometimes remediable—usually isn't. One doesn't intentionally set out to
be incompetent, incompetent when it comes to understanding or or doing
this thing or that thing. To get something wrong (having tried to get it
'right'), doesn't strike me as blameworthy, although one could argue
about that; Aristotle says in the /NE/ that for not knowing /certain/
things a man /can/ be blamed. I doubt if misunderstanding Popper is one
of them.
If I were Donal, I'd probably feel the same as he about the mistreatment
of one of my philosophical heroes. I'm not sure thought that I'd see
this as having, so to speak, moral overtones. To get out of having to
write more just now, I'll quote the beginning of the entry on Popper in
the Stanford online encyclopedia of philosophy, by way of suggesting
that Popper has not been entirely forgotten.
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/>
/First published Thu Nov 13, 1997; substantive revision Mon Feb 9, 2009/
'Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers
of science of the 20th century. He was also a social and political
philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed
‘critical-rationalist’, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism,
conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs
generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the ‘Open
Society’, and an implacable critic of totalitarianism in all of its
forms. One of the many remarkable features of Popper's thought is the
scope of his intellectual influence. In the modern technological and
highly-specialised world scientists are rarely aware of the work of
philosophers; it is virtually unprecedented to find them queuing up, as
they have done in Popper's case, to testify to the enormously practical
beneficial impact which that philosophical work has had upon their own.
But notwithstanding the fact that he wrote on even the most technical
matters with consummate clarity, the scope of Popper's work is such that
it is commonplace by now to find that commentators tend to deal with the
epistemological, scientific and social elements of his thought as if
they were quite disparate and unconnected, and thus the fundamental
unity of his philosophical vision and method has to a large degree been
dissipated. Here we will try to trace the threads which interconnect the
various elements of his philosophy, and which give it its fundamental
unity.'
[body of article snipped]
Robert Paul
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