Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902 – 1994) was an influential Austrian-British philosopher, especially known as a philosopher of science. Popper was born and brought up in Austria, where he qualified as a teacher and taught physics and mathematics in a high school. Although he was brought up as a Christian, his family had converted from Judaism, so when the Nazi's looked likely to declare Austria part of Germany he looked to leave the country. [According to the racist Nazi laws, people with Jewish grandparents were legally considered Jews and so subject to the 'final solution', i.e., having their property confiscated, being deported, sent to work camps, and ultimately being murdered by the state.]
He wrote and published Logik der Forschung, which was translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which tackled the problem of induction and secured him an academic post in New Zealand and first publicised his ideas about science proceeding in terms of conjecture and refutation. He was later appointed to the London School of Economics. As well as his work in philosophy of science he wrote opposing revolutionary approach to political life (arguing that it was not scientific to overthrow a system by something completely different, but rather society needed to be engineered by testing out changes one at a time) and in The Open Society and Its Enemies he criticised in some depth ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx. His opposition to ideas of revolutionary change was also reflected in the Popper-Kuhn debate where he argued against Kuhn's notion of science proceeding through paradigm-shifts as revolutions.
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