INSCRIBED BY KARL POPPER TO RENOWNED PHILOSOPHER WILLARD V. O. QUINE, VERY SCARCE PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION FIRST EDITION OF POPPER'S OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

POPPER, Karl R. Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Octavo, original dark gray cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition, presentation/association copy of a collection of seminal essays by Popper, “one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century,” inscribed to Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the century’s “most dominant figures in Anglo-American philosophy” (Encyclopedia Britannica), “To Van, with love, from Karl.”

Popper "is widely recognized as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century" (Wallace, Knowledge Management, 22). Objective Knowledge brings together his "major articles and lectures from a dazzling 15-year period" (Corvi, Thought of Karl Popper, 10). Here Popper develops his "distinction between three interdependent worlds; World 1 is the physical world; World 2 is the subjective mental world; World 3 is the objective world of theories, mathematics, literature, art and the life, within which there exist objective logical relations" (Shand, Philosophy and Philosophers, 283). To Popper, "knowledge is fundamentally evolutionary… every discovery is in fact the inevitable result of an evolutionary process… the sequence of the events that led to Newton's codification of the laws of gravity, which are processes of the second world, are independent of the nature of gravity itself. The laws of gravity were in a very real sense waiting for Newton's discovery" (Wallace, 24). Popper, who was "enormously influential in the philosophy of science, and on the methodology of the social sciences," was also "greatly concerned with the totalitarian dangers of socialist and Marxist mass collectivization and of the belief in the inevitable laws of historical development" (Shand, 271-2). Containing ten major essays brought together for the first time in book form, including the important "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject"; the previously unpublished "Two Faces of Common Sense"; "The Aim of Science," revising a paper issued in the journal Ratio (1957); "Evolution and the Tree of Knowledge," revising a lecture delivered in Oxford in 1961, and the Appendix with the first publication in English of a lecture delivered in German in 1948, here titled, "The Bucket and the Searchlight," featuring some ideas "not published elsewhere" (341). Also issued in wrappers, no priority established. The recipient, Willard Van Orman Quine, "produced highly original and important work in several areas of philosophy" (Encyclopaedia Britannica). "With Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls, Quine is among the most often quoted philosophers of the 20th century" (ANB).

Fine condition.