Critical rationalism on the patio

I could get used to blogging from the patio, now that there is an excellent wireless connection! Ok, so let me bring it on ... although it's a bit embarrassing, really. It's well over a year that I reviewed volume 1 of Karl Popper's The Open Society & its enemies, but I can report completion of the second volume only now. It didn't take me so long because it was tedious reading, quite on the contrary!

It's fascinating to follow Popper's differentiated assessment of Hegel & Marx: Hegel gets the nuclear treatment while Popper finds many instances of agreement with Marx, which is rather surprising. But naturally, there is complete disagreement with regards to Marx's historicistic prophecies concerning the inevitable advent of socialism.

The most fascinating part are the closing chapters however, where Popper explains in some details his philosophical approach of critical rationalism. I think that his assessment of the sociology of knowledge and his rebuttal of the meaning of history still have an enormous political impact today. These two volumes are studied far too rarely!