What are You Reading Now?
- Thread starter python
- Start date
SmokingPipes.com Updates
Watch for Updates Twice a Week
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Site Sponsors
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
- Status
I am reading Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye".
Sounds very interesting...I wasn't familiar with it so I looked it up.
I certainly agree with his view that science should be deductive rather than inductive.
Hard to get research grant$ that way, though.
I only knew Popper from epistemology. He was a positivist, and they tried to rescue science from radical scepticism by stating that you could never be sure of an empirical conclusion, but you could approach surety by trying to prove your idea wrong and failing. The more rigorous tests your idea passed, the likelier it was true. This led to the modern notion in the scientific method that one should posit a null hypothesis and then fail to prove it, thus adding weight to the experimenter’s actual hypothesis. It’s also the basis of saying that something isn’t scientific unless it’s falsifiable, because science consists of trying to falsify an idea and failing to do so. It’s a weird epistemology to me, but it’s taken over modern science wholesale.
But his politics I never read. And the term Open Society has meant everything from government transparency, as in the opposite of, say, the USSR, to some weird modern borderless non-nation, as in the Open Society Foundation. I’m guessing he is a precursor to Soros, but I don’t know until I read.
?
Yes, he is, he was his teacher:
Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
plato.stanford.edu
I freaked out when you posted that book's cover and saw the term "open society": it just rang all the alarm bells, so I did a search for Popper (had never heard of him myself) and got my suspicions confirmed. Now, excuse me whilst I duck and cover.
I'd be interested to learn if your perspective in either regard changes after reading. I'd never heard of him before today, but from what little I've had time to read it seems just the opposite to me...seems like his perspective on and approach to science is mostly in direct opposition to the typical manner in which much of modern, establishment science operates. And his social/political perspective appears to be in opposition to the mentality and methods of someone like Soros.
But the devil is always in the details, and there's no doubt a lot more to it than what I've gleaned at this point.
That’s why I’m reading him. It’s hard to unravel. Every philosopher means something different when they use words like “freedom,” and you have to dig in the details to see what they mean.
I am now reading the 18th book in Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series. It's titled "The Case of the Haunted Husband".
- Status