Birth of Karl Popper

Karl Popper was born on 28 July 1902 in Vienna. An Austrian-born British philosopher of science, Popper argued that the mark of a scientific theory is that it can be falsified, meaning that it makes predictions that could in principle be shown to be wrong, as set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He rejected inductivism, and criticized Marxism and psychoanalysis as unfalsifiable. In political philosophy, his book The Open Society and Its Enemies defended liberal democracy and attacked the totalitarian tendencies he saw in Plato, Hegel and Marx. He fled Austria before the Nazi annexation, taught in New Zealand and then at the London School of Economics.

Open on the timeline