The Popperian Podcast

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jagdish Hattiangadi. They speak about the importance of the discovery of problems for science, philosophy, progress and for the growth of all knowledge, the relationship between problems and questions, the logical structure of problems, the need to understand their historiography, and just what it means t...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Michael Munger. They speak about James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's book The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy , and how it is that rational individuals agree to be coerced by consenting to the rules which define their political system. Michael Munger is a professor of...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Donald Gillies. They speak about Donald's time at the London School of Economics, his personal and professional experiences with Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, the importance of an historical approach to philosophy, specifically how we should understand truth in medicine, and the history o...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Nimrod Bar-Am. They speak about the life of the philosopher Joseph Agassi (1927-2023), where his work continued from and diverged from that of Karl Popper, Agassi's historiography of Science, the important and central role that Agassi gave to metaphysics in understanding scientific development, how ethics...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Paul Levinson. They speak about the philosophy of W.W. Bartley, the history of comprehensive rationalism, Karl Popper's critical rationalism, why Bartley thought that all such theories were inadequate and unnecessarily opened the door for irrationalism, and how Bartley's own theory of pancritical rational...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Elyse Hargreaves. They speak about chapter 10 of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, the nature and often well-meaning origins of totalitarianism, the fall of Athens to Sparta, the betrayal of Socrates and Athenian democracy by Plato and the oligarchical class, and the one factor that Popper h...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with James Kierstead. From The Open Society and Its Enemies, later essays, and private letters , they speak about the meaning behind Karl Popper's 'paradox of tolerance':  "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Susan Blackmore. They speak about her book The Meme Machine , and David Deutsch's anti-rational meme hypothesis from his book The Beginning of Infinity . Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, lecturer and writer researching consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, as well as a Visiting Professor at t...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Joseph Agassi. They speak about the place for argument and debate, how criticism should and should not look, why so much of this energy is futile and why we have such high hopes for debate/argument/criticism regardless, as well as wonderful asides such as lessons in how to brainwash people and how to avoi...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Joseph Agassi. They speak about Joseph's background as a student of Karl Popper, his life and his philosophy, his interactions with people such as Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, John Watkins, and Thomas Kuhn, and most importantly Joseph's criticisms of various aspects of their philosophy. Joseph Agassi is...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Rafe Champion. They speak about the social (institutional) theme within Karl Popper's philosophy of science as well as his approach to politics. Popper argued that objectivity in science does not come from the impartiality of scientists, but rather from the social/institutional aspect of the scientific me...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Michael Ignatieff. They speak about Michael's new book On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times , and the important role that truth plays in consolation. Between 2006 and 2011, Michael Ignatieff served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jagdish Hattiangadi. They speak about the induction of Francis Bacon, why Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn rejected it, how this rejection was based on a misunderstanding/misreading of Bacon, and importantly how this rejection of induction opened a space for " the belittlers of science " to " undermine the soc...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Anthony O'Hear. They speak about Anthony's book 'Karl Popper: The Arguments of the Philosophers', and its central claim that: "Popper's attempt to dispense with induction is unsuccessful. We have found that inductive reasoning, removed from one part of the picture, crops up in another." *Induction (defini...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ken Gemes. They speak about the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, how that philosophy intersects and diverges with the philosophy of Karl Popper, what both men got right and what they got wrong, how the philosophies and legacies of both men will continue into the future, as well as looking into Ken's own...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jonathan Rauch. They speak about Jonathan's books Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought and The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth , the Popperian influence within them both, where (and how) the message of Karl Popper remains resonant and important today for the societies we live...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with David Edmonds. They speak about David's book Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. Blurb: " On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for th...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Richard Landes. They speak about the history of antisemitism, its unique characteristics and intensity throughout centuries and millennia, the strange ability of ordinary people to uncritically accept nearly any claim against the Jews (no matter how farfetched it is), the lethal narratives that are told a...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jeremy Shearmur. They speak about the time that Jeremy spent working with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, the seeds of classical liberalism within Popper's epistemology, the role for free markets as constant feedback mechanisms for the consent of people, the failure of politics to achieve t...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with James Kierstead. They speak about Karl Popper's work The Open Society and Its Enemies, the years that Popper spent in New Zealand writing this book, what Popper thought about his adopted country, Popper's attack on Plato for his " unmitigated authoritarianism ", how valid this attack was, the controversy...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Oseni Taiwo Afisi. They speak about Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the ideas and history behind the work, the place for the Open Society and Popper's epistemology within the African context, how the communalism and collectivism in traditional Africa does not make it analogous to the...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Steve Fuller. They speak about Steve's book Kuhn Vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science , how Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn each regarded the scientific method, the differences between these two conceptions, the significance of the arguments involved and how they defined both science and public op...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Maarten Boudry. They speak about how we distinguish between science and pseudoscience (otherwise known as the demarcation problem ), Karl Popper's famous solution involving falsifiability, why the demarcation problem persists and remains a live issue and how Popper's solution might be inadequate, Maarten'...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Robin Attfield. They speak about the life and work of the pre-Socratic philosophers Xenophanes and Parmenides, how Xenophanes in particular has been unjustly disparaged and misunderstood over the years, how Karl Popper rehabilitated Xenophanes' image and his philosophy, the place of both Xenophanes and Pa...

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Nicholas Maxwell. They speak about Karl Popper's scientific method, what Maxwell's disagreements with Popper are, the difference between bare and dressed falsificationism, the problems presented by the apparent unity of knowledge and the preference within science for unified theories, as opposed to infini...