Karl R. Popper - The World of Parmenides

Those who are only familiar with the work of Sir Karl Popper as philosopher of science or defender of Enlightenment society against its enemies owe it to themselves to read this largely posthumous collection of essays. For it is here that we meet the sixteen-year-old Popper on a magic chariotride through the very origins of science themselves, the Presocratic philosophers, in an imaginative land halfway between myth and reason, an older dogmatism and a newer skepticism. It is here, also, that we get to see his own conjectures and refutations develop over time, his own tentative formulations and changes of mind, his own attempt to practice the method of inquiry that he attributes to Xenophanes and Parmenidesa refreshing exposure to a mind actually at work revising itself, not yet having lost its sense of mystery and new discovery. Routledge is to be commended for reissuing the book in the Routledge Classics series, for our picture of this philosopher and author is not complete without its delineation of his birth as a mind among the scattered shards of the birth of the Western mind itself.

This is not to say that the actual elements of Poppers construction will appeal to all. Few scholars would agree with his picture of Parmenidean truth as a dark sphere of impermeable matter. More, but still a minority, would agree with his claim that the philosophy of Plato is more favorable to science than the philosophy of Aristotle. But Popper was one who took the Presocratics seriouslyalthough not in the way in which they are today taken seriouslyand thus one who, as such, deserves gratitude and respect. For we still have not recovered from the lobotomizing effect of Aristotles slant on his predecessors as rudimentary thinkers, infant employers of reason, or simply bad scientists.

Poppers essays themselves are repetitive if read in the sequence in which the present volume presents them, but this is not necessarily a defect if what one wishes to see in them is the birth of a collection of living thoughts, always in the process of growth. The overall narrative might be summarized as follows. Popper finds in Xenophanes the first hint of the genuinely self-critical attitude which he wishes to attribute to science proper and to his own philosophy of science in particular. Mortals possess belief (as distinguished from knowledge), but can improve over time if they refrain from anthropocentrism in conjecture. There is no hint here of the dogmatic and political dangers Popper finds lurking in later, more ramified, systematic thinking. Parmenides, working with this inherited distinction between belief and knowledge, draws out its implications in an attempt to say what Truth would have to be in order to be knowableone of the first genuinely scientific Popperian conjectures. Parmenides is also a scientist in his own right, with his discovery that the moon receives her light from the sun and the theory of light and dark that Popper finds issuing from this discovery. Zeno, taking the hypothetical, conjectural method from his predecessors, refines it into an art of refutation through logical disproof. It is then with Plato and Aristotle that we get a quenching of the newly awakened scientific spirit. Platonic dialectic, although it is hypothetical, makes a dire pretense to certain knowledge in the political sphere; Aristotle, finding a justification for first principles in intuition alone (rather than in conjecture and refutation), abandons the fruitful skeptical attitude for a dogmatism which thereafter settles over philosophy and science for many centuries, a dogmatism whose ultimate political consequences are still visible in the after-effects of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, in the enemies of the open society.

In this story of Poppers narrative I of course leave out of account many amplifications and side journeys: interpretations of Heraclitus and Pythagoras; an extension of the narrative into the Einsteinian and post-Einsteinian physics of space and time; comments on recent Parmenides scholarship, especially that of Charles Kahn and Alexander P.D. Mourelatos; contrasts between Platonic and Pythagorean methods of treating axioms and deductions from axioms; bits of philology and attempts to clear up translation problems (for example, in Parmenides fragment 16); and conjectures about Parmenides relationship with a blind or half-blind sister. Popper takes the Eleatics seriously enough so that they have something substantive to say to the physics contemporary with himself; they are astonishingly modern and post-modern, in no sense lost fragments of an antiquity that has receded beyond reach. Indeed, it is by touching base with them, he thinks, that we are to revitalize physics and philosophy of science, by keeping them faithful to their original missions.