Karl Popper

Family and training[edit]

Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902 to upper-middle-class parents. All of Popper's grandparents were assimilated Jews; the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before he was born^[13][14] and so he received a Lutheran baptism.^[15][16] His father, Simon Siegmund Carl Popper (1856-1932), was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University. His mother, Jenny Schiff (1864-1938), was an accomplished pianist of Silesian and Hungarian descent. Popper's uncle was the Austrian philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkeus. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society, as Popper's father became a partner in the law firm of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimund Grübl, and after Grübl's death in 1898 took over the business. Popper received his middle name after Raimund Grübl.^[13] (In his autobiography, Popper erroneously recalls that Grübl's first name was Carl).^[17] His parents were close friends of Sigmund Freud's sister Rosa Graf.^[18] His father was a bibliophile who had 12,000–14,000 volumes in his personal library^[19] and took an interest in philosophy, the classics, and social and political issues.^[9] Popper inherited both the library and the disposition from him.^[20] Later, he would describe the atmosphere of his upbringing as having been "decidedly bookish".^[9]


Popper left school at the age of 16 and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and the history of music as a guest student at the University of Vienna. In 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, which was at that time a party that fully adopted the Marxist ideology.^[9] After the street battle in the Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919, when police shot eight of his unarmed party comrades, he turned away from what he saw as the philosopher Karl Marx's historical materialism, abandoned the ideology, and remained a supporter of social liberalism throughout his life.^[3]


Popper worked in street construction for a short time but was unable to cope with the heavy labour. Continuing to attend university as a guest student, he started an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker, which he completed as a journeyman. He was dreaming at that time of starting a daycare facility for children, for which he assumed the ability to make furniture might be useful. After that, he did voluntary service in one of psychoanalyst Alfred Adler's clinics for children. In 1922, he did his matura by way of a second chance education and finally joined the university as an ordinary student. He completed his examination as an elementary teacher in 1924 and started working at an after-school care club for socially endangered children. In 1925, he went to the newly founded Pädagogisches Institut and continued studying philosophy and psychology. Around that time he started courting Josefine Anna Henninger, who later became his wife.


Popper and his wife had chosen not to have children because of the circumstances of war in the early years of their marriage. Popper commented that this "was perhaps a cowardly but in a way a right decision".^[21]


In 1928, Popper earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler—with Moritz Schlick being the second chair of the thesis committee. His dissertation was titled Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie (On Questions of Method in the Psychology of Thinking).^[22] In 1929, he obtained an authorisation to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school and began doing so. He married his colleague Josefine Anna Henninger (1906–1985) in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss, he started to use the evenings and the nights to write his first book Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge). He needed to publish a book to get an academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent. In the end, he did not publish the two-volume work; but instead, a condensed version with some new material, as Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) in 1934. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductivism, and logical positivism, and put forth his theory of potential falsifiability as the criterion demarcating science from non-science. In 1935 and 1936, he took unpaid leave to go to the United Kingdom for a study visit.^[23]