Karl Popper
Biography
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born, British philosopher of science. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science; for advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; and for his defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the "open society" possible. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper [May 2005]Historicism
Historicism has developed three divergent, though loosely related, meanings:
Karl Popper used the term in his influential book the Poverty of historicism, to mean: "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (p. 3, italics in original). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism [2004]
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