Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
How I Became a Philosopher Without Trying
In this lecture I trace the progressive stages of my education and academic career, and the manifold influences upon my development either by reading or through friendship with people who knew more than I did.
When it came to choosing a profession, I decided to become a teacher in a primary school, and later in a secondary school; and I studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna with these aims.
I became greatly attracted to philosophical problems, but I felt that I would never be able to solve any of them. In any case, I found the problems of physics, and especially of Darwinism, even more exciting. After I became a schoolteacher, I published a book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, on a subject now called the philosophy of science. When the rise of Hitler made it necessary to think of emigration, this book opined for me a university career of which I had not dreamt before.
What had set me on my path towards methodology of science was my attempt at criticizing Marxism, starting in the autumn of 1919. In trying to analyse Marx's claim to scientific status of his theory, according to which socialism -or communism- was inevitably bound to defeat what he called "capitalism", I had to ask myself the question: What are the criteria that distinguish genuine science from pseudo-science? Not only did my early critique of Marxism lead, after twenty-five years, to my book The Open Society and its Enemies, but the problems of the methodology of science have become the central problems of my own philosophy. They led to many other fruitful problems.
