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More About the Philosophers | |||||||||||||||||
| A Little about Karl Popper | |||||||||||||||||
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Karl Popper (1902-1994). Born in Vienna, this mercurial schoolteacher, woodworker and moralist first came to popular attention with the two-volume "The Open Society and its Enemies" (1945). He described this as his war effort, a profound critique of Plato and Marx and a defence of democratic priciples which he wrote during his exile in New Zealand from 1937 to 1945. Popper is generally regarded as a social democrat but his views can be interpreted in a libertarian spirit which places him close to his friend Hayek. At the London School of Economics from 1946 to 1969 he resumed the work on logic and scientific method which he had pursued as a major hobby in previous schoolteaching years when he was referred to as the "offical opposition" to the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. In the 1960s Popper's thinking took a marked evolutionary turn and biology became a twin obsession along with his first love, physics. He remained active in retirement, with a large and appreciative following among scientists. He never achieved the same standing in the mainstream of philosophy and one of Bartley's most interesting achievements was to provide a plausible explanation for this strange situation. | ||||||||||||||||
| A Little about William Warren Bartley III | |||||||||||||||||
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Bill Bartley (1934-1990) was an outstanding scholar, editor and biographer. His achievements in any one of these endeavours would have satisfied the ambitions of most people and this is all the more remarkable as he died tragically young. Originally a Harvard man, he later studied in London with Karl Popper. His doctoral work led to the publication of an exciting and pathbreaking book on the crisis of rationality in modern Protestantism, titled "The Retreat to Commitment". This was reissued by Open Court in 1985 with additional material charting some important developments in his thoughts on rationality and the limits of criticism. As a biographer he made a mark with best-selling books on Wittgenstein and Werner Erhard, the founder of Erhard Seminars Training (est). In the 1980s he assisted Popper to publish the long-awaited "Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery" which had been in galleys since the 1950s. Subsequently he began work on a biography of Popper. His research led him to interview F A Hayek, leading to an invitation to be the authorised biographer of Hayek. As the General Editor of the "Hayek Project", he set out to produce a new and uniform edition of Hayek's collected works. | ||||||||||||||||
| A Little about Hayek | |||||||||||||||||
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Friederich August Hayek (1899-1992) became the leading modern exponent of the Austrian school of social thought which was started by Carl Menger (1840-1921)and aggresively carried forward by Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). The distinctive features of the Austrian school are methodological individualism and the subjective theory of value. "Austrians" have tended to be libertarians or non-socialist liberals and Hayek was the major opponent of Keynes in the 1930s. In 1945 Hayek published "The Road to Serfdom" as a warning to the socialists of the world, explaining the similarity of communism and fascism and the way that freedom can rapidly be eroded when governments attempt to achieve too much. Socialism was so deeply entrenched among the intellectuals that Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society to keep alive the embers of non-socialist liberalism. Hayek graced many disciplines with his wide-ranging scholarship and incisive thinking. His efforts were rewarded with a share of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. In addition to his contribution to economics he wrote imortant books in the history of ideas, the methods of the social sciences, the principles of psychology and the evolution of morality and the spontaneous orders of modern civilisation. His last book "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism" was edited by Bill Bartley. | ||||||||||||||||
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