The Popper, Kirk, and Lloyd Controversy Revisited

Abstract

Back to was title of a lecture that Karl Popper gave in London to members of Aristotelian Society on Octo-ber 13, 1958.' On that particular occasion, al-though he declared that he would speak only an amateur, as a lover of beautiful story of Pre-Socratics,2 he put forth a few inter-pretations to which Geoffrey Stephen Kirk and Geoffrey Lloyd, Cambridge University ex-perts on classical culture, reacted quite strongly.It was especially concept of applied by Austrian author to Pre-Socratics that led to a powerful and lasting controversy. Paying special attention to nu-ances involved in Popper's interpretation, Donald Wiebe has underlined fact that in Popper's view, Pre-Socratics therefore not founders of modern science but rather founders of modern scientific rationality.3 Consequently, as we shall see, what Popper maintained in his discussion of Pre-Socratic philosophy was a type of that in fact lay at origin of occidental world, the only civilization which based upon sci-ence.4As Claudiu Mesaro§ has observed, Karl Popper sees in Ionian school of thought a source of all questions and acquisitions of modern contemporary science.5 Indeed, in The Myth of Framework (the source of Claudiu Mesaro§'s statement), 6 Popper's vision of history of European science was based on so-called Greek miracle,7 an event suppos-edly generated by Pre-Socratics' rational reflections: But what of original miracle-the rise of poetry, art, philoso-phy, and science; real origin of Western ra-tionalism?8 Making use of similar rhetorical questions, Karl Popper concluded without any hesitation whatsoever that our ideas of free-dom, of democracy, of toleration, and also ideas of knowledge, of science, of rationality, can all be traced back to these beginnings.9 Obviously, in accordance with his personal perspective of rationalism, idea of seemed to him the most funda-mental idea. 10 However, he was not referring to a particular type of rationality, but to critical rationality which contributed to advancement of knowledge by means of a movement that would ensure checking previ-ous theories constantly-since only theories that can be falsified are truly scientific theo-ries.The essay Back to should thus be placed next to essays verifying origins of occidental rationalism. Popper's hermeneutical approach proves that statement attributed to Henri Poincare, i.e., the scale creates phenomenon,'1 actu-ally correct (in a flash of inspiration, Professor Christopher Buck called it Scalar bias); 12 to be sure, since it a premise that cannot be avoided by any interpretation, it can be verified in Popper's article too. In his endeavor to elucidate significance of certain Pre-So-cratic fragments, he starts out by postulating that they were representatives of a simple straightforward rationality.'* Its decisive ele-ment is attitude which, as I shall try to show, was first developed in Ionian School.'4 In Popper's opinion, this at-titude common to almost all of Thales's suc-cessors.For example, Anaximander, his brilliant follower, reached conclusion that shape of earth spherical rather than cylindrical precisely because he had taken over his prede-cessor's opinions in a manner, rejecting them and arguing in favor of a superior hypothesis:Thus it was a speculative and argument, abstract discussion of Thales's theory, which almost led him to true theory of shape of earth; and it was observational experi-ence which led him astray. 15Following same path, that is, taking over critically their predecessors' working hypoth-eses, most thinkers of ancient Greece contrib-uted to perpetuity of certain remarkable hy-potheses, a fact that may account for emergence of many theories of modern pe-riod. …