In 1970 a twenty six year old Tasmanian born agricultural science graduate had the optimism to send an unsolicited letter to a certain Karl Popper who resided in Buckinghamshire, England. The letter commenced:
"Dear Sir Karl,
At the moment I am running a 'popularisation of Popper' campaign because I believe that even if you are not the Galileo of the social sciences, you have solved enough important problems to be worthy of a wider hearing. I am surprised that Bertrand Russell did not use his vast popularity among humanists and liberals to promote your work. I was also surprised to find, in a survey of the indices of fifteen or twenty thick volumes of sociological theory (American) published since 1950, that the name Popper did not appear in one of them."
The young letter writer was Rafe Champion, and the letter started a chain of communication with Karl and subsequent meetings. Champion in 2013 still feels that Karl Popper's philosophy has much to offer and also that for various reasons, not the least being due to the vagaries of intellectual fashion, his thought has not always been analysed and commented on, particularly in philosophy courses, with the rigour it deserves. In an attempt to at least supply a straight feed he has embarked on publishing a Popular Popper series that aims to summarise a number of Popper's key texts with a minimum of interpretation.
Even though I am fairly familiar with Popper's key works I have found that Champion's summaries are wonderful refreshers and glean salient points that are easily overlooked. It is easy to look at the covers of books on one's own library shelves and assume that one is familiar with the contained arguments, truly an illustration of the independent existence of the third world of objective knowledge if ever there is one. In fact from many commentaries that I have read of Popper over the years I am not sure that a lot of his critics have actually absorbed his original writings rather than via superficial glances. If ever there is an author that continually surprises with depth and rigour it is Karl Popper.
He was not a terribly effective sales person for his own product, partly because he was so obsessed with manufacturing his product to the highest level of argumentative rigour. This has at times made the explication and evolution of his arguments difficult for casual students to disentangle. Rafe Champion is providing a service to those who wish to become familiar with Popper's ideas without distortions of interpretation introduced by such commentators as Kuhn and Lakatos, Stove and many others.
Champion has provided an extremely useful tool to the understanding of Popper's world view in the Appendix II of A Guide to the Open Society and its Enemies. This is the breakdown of six Popperian themes:
(1) conjectural,
(2) objective,
(3) against conceptual analysis or essentialism,
(4) social,
(5) metaphysical,
(6) biological or evolutionary.
This is Champion's key to unlock Popper.
The Open Society and Its Enemies was a contribution by Karl Popper to the reconstruction of the world from the horrors of the Second World War. It contains much wisdom that is applicable to our current era.
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