the “critical rationalists” (who are a contemporary movement that involves David Deutsch, the “taking children seriously” people, and some larger set of folks who try to practice a certain set of motions and are based out of the UK, I think)?
Critical rationalism is basically the scientific philosophy of Karl R. Popper.
An Austrian, he relocated to the UK in the 30s for similar reasons to Sigmund Freud’s. So CR ended as being a kind of UK thing, despite having its roots in the Vienna Circle. (It also has a following in Oz and NZ, but not so much in the states).
It’s not particularly contemporary, therefore...more of a version 2.0 of logical positivism. I don’t know of any specific connection between mid 20th century UK atheism/humanism and CR...but it would be strange if there were none.
There were a lot of developments in philosophy-of-science post WWII—Kuhn, Feyerabend , etc—and CR somewhat faded from fashion until Deutsch revived it with his popular work in the 1990s. (Although Popper’s falsificational criterion for science remains popular among working scientists).
Deutsch’s (and other subsequent) versions of CR got entangled with Austrian economic, libertarianism ,and various other minority beliefs.
Critical rationalism is basically the scientific philosophy of Karl R. Popper. An Austrian, he relocated to the UK in the 30s for similar reasons to Sigmund Freud’s. So CR ended as being a kind of UK thing, despite having its roots in the Vienna Circle. (It also has a following in Oz and NZ, but not so much in the states).
It’s not particularly contemporary, therefore...more of a version 2.0 of logical positivism. I don’t know of any specific connection between mid 20th century UK atheism/humanism and CR...but it would be strange if there were none.
There were a lot of developments in philosophy-of-science post WWII—Kuhn, Feyerabend , etc—and CR somewhat faded from fashion until Deutsch revived it with his popular work in the 1990s. (Although Popper’s falsificational criterion for science remains popular among working scientists).
Deutsch’s (and other subsequent) versions of CR got entangled with Austrian economic, libertarianism ,and various other minority beliefs.