The philosophy of Karl Popper (1902–94) has gained a range of interest and reaction far wider than that normally received by professional philosophers; in recent times only Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) obtained comparable (probably still greater) attention. Convinced that philosophical problems and issues came from outside philosophy itself, especially science, Popper addressed a broad audience. However, he also entered the professionals’ field, and indeed attacked some major epistemological tenets held there, such as the assumption that knowledge was accreted by the inductive (...) accumulation and classification of facts. The response to Popper’s work has created interest in his life, which was known as falling in three periods: birth and early career in Vienna, followed by nearly a decade in New Zealand, and finally a rather reclusive lifestyle in Britain after the Second World War. This book, devoted to the first two periods, is the outcome of a long research effort by the author started well before Popper’s death and incorporating a doctorate received in 1993. His book shows the incompleteness of Popper’s autobiography of 1974, which hitherto has been our main source. (shrink)

Hegel´s social and political thought has been often been interpreted as a defense of authoritarian statism against modern individualism. In this paper I claim, on the contrary, that the value and dignity of the individual is the conclusion of Hegel´s philosophical anthropology and, thus, the principle and foundation of his entire political philosophy. The value and dignity of the individual rely, more precisely, on her freedom of selfdetermination. The different forms of personal interaction that Hegel develops in his philosophy of (...) Right are thus those that offer the condition of possibility for the exercise of the freedom of self-determination of each individual. Freedom as the capacity to determine oneself does not imply, however, that the goal of human action should be that each individual does whatever she wants. Common good is not the necessary result of the sum of all the actions of the individuals in order to obtain their private well-being; precisely because that is not the case, the common good must be a goal in itself and there must exist a specific organization that takes it as its own goal, namely the State. Indeed, the whole meaning of the State is for Hegel to guarantee that all individuals in society become effectively autonomous agents and can exert their capacity of selfdetermination. (shrink)