Popper versus Kirk: A Controversy in the Interpretation of Greek Science

Abstract

It is a minor scandal that specialists in the interpretation of early Greek thought have, in general, paid so little attention to Professor Sir Karl Popper's provocative foray into their territory in his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society (Popper, 1958). That paper was answered by Professor G. S. Kirk in an article in Mind (Kirk, 1960), and since then both scholars have contributed a second paper which develops parts of their respective views (Kirk, 1961, Popper, 1963). But subsequently the debate has fizzled out. Nor, so far as I know, has any other classical scholar besides Kirk taken part (though Mr J. E. Raven repeated some of Kirk's criticisms of Popper in a paper read to the joint conference of the Hellenic and Roman Societies in I965). And yet their controversy raises two fundamental issues, first the major philosophical question of the logic of scientific discovery, and secondly the historical question concerning the characteristics and methods of Greek natural philosophy. It is this latter question that I wish to take up here.' In particular I wish to broaden the field of the discussion to take the whole of early Greek speculative thought (and not merely the work of the philosophers) into account. And I shall suggest where certain generalisations which may apply to those writers whose interests were primarily cosmological should be modified when we take all the available evidence for the period down to Plato into account. I shall, however, begin by rehearsing briefly the main arguments that have been advanced by Popper and by Kirk concerning the Presocratic philosophers. Popper's original paper was entitled 'Back to the Presocratics'. 'What I want to return to', he said, 'is the simple straightforward rationality of the Presocratics. The simplicity and boldness of their questions is part of it,