POPPER, Karl.

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The Logic of Scientific Discovery. First edition in English, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to his friend, the philosophical broadcaster Bryan Magee, "Diffidently hoping that you will enjoy this book. K. R. Popper". By 1959, Bryan Magee (1930-2019) was establishing himself as a political and intellectual broadcaster. In 1970, he hosted a radio series on Conversations with Philosophers: Karl Popper was the subject of two episodes. In 1973, Magee wrote a book-length study of his friend's philosophy, his first such work and one of the earliest such studies of Popper. Magee did indeed enjoy the Logic of Scientific Discovery - in his 1998 memoir, he wrote that it "spelt total shipwreck for logical positivism" (p. 57). The Logic is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant works in the philosophy of science. Reflecting on it in 1998, Magee wrote that "at the point we have reached around the year 2000, to be a self-aware and sophisticated empiricist has to mean either being a Popperian or being a critical and reconstructed Popperian... he is the foremost philosopher of the age" (p. 246). This English edition was extensively rewritten by Popper, with new footnotes and 150 pages of new appendices, including a manuscript facsimile of a letter from Einstein, discussing Heisenberg's interpretation of quantum theory. It was published in both UK and US editions in 1959, with the UK preceding. The work was published in German in 1934.

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