Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.

POPPER, Karl.

$3,500.00

Item Number: 100965

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

Second edition of this major work by Popper. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Lionel, the most generously appreciative of readers from Karl June 1965.” The recipient Lionel Robbins was a prominent member of the economics department at the London School of Economics and a close friend and colleague of Popper. The pair were colleagues for over twenty years, with Popper first taking up a Readership at the LSE in 1945 before being appointed Professor of Logic and Scientific Method in 1949. Their relationship was principally professional, forming a strong inter-departmental alliance, fortified by their mutual friendship with Friedrich von Hayek. In a letter to Hayek on 20th October 1964, Popper wrote: “… I should also mention that, through your closeness to Lionel Robbins, I got to know him; and he is now my stand-by in the School, outside my department. He has been very good to me, and has helped me immensely, in many difficult situations at the school” (Shearmur & Turner, pp. 249). They also had significant intellectual intersections, with Robbins playing a role in the development of two of Popper’s most important works, The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism. For Popper, Robbins was “the uncrowned king of the LSE” (quoted in Dahrendorf, p. 422): “I loved and admired him, most of all for his moral and personal qualities – and as a teacher” (Howson, 7). Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. An exceptional association.

Conjectures and Refutations is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.