Popper History 'analysis

Karl R. Popper, the celebrated thinker of 20th century, lives through nearly for a whole century. The philosophy system of critique rationalism which he constructs is extremely influential to the academic circle. Popper is also a historical philosopher, who proposes many original opinions on historical ontology, historical epistemology, and historical methodology, and whose historical thought is profoundly connotative. This article takes Popper's historical thought as the object of study, tries hard to systematically comb and prove it from the aspects of historical ontology, historical epistemology and historical methodology.The core of Popper's historical thought is"Anti-historicalism". He establishes his theory of historical ontology, historical epistemology and historical methodology on the basis of criticizing"historicalism", which has the dominant characteristic of theoreticalness. On historical ontology, Popper criticizes the historicalism viewpoint that there exists regulation in history, and that history can be predicted. He believed that the social history phenomenon cannot duplicate and the trend of social history phenomenon is by no means regulation. The philosophical foundation of Popper's history ontology is the'Third World'theory, which has the characteristic of objectivity and independency. While viewing from the proof of Popper's history ontology, his historical thought is essentially idealistic.In the aspect of historical epistemology, Popper explained the nature of history, and definited history as a science. He pointed out that the responsibility of history is to explain and to describe. For historical explanation, Popper made some valuable judgments; such as the historical explanation is multi-dimensional, dynamic, and non-theory of history etc. He considered that historical research needs selecting, and that there is relativity in history recognition; thus he criticized integrationism principle of history epistemology. Popper's historical understanding is by no means history nihilism and historical agnosticism. Regarding question whether history has significance and whether history is objective, he gave a negative reply.In the field of historical methodology, Popper criticized the support-naturalism doctrine and the anti-naturalism theory of historicism theory. He thought this is misunderstanding of the application of scientific method in history research. Popper disagreed the methodologies of essentialism and integralism; and in the construction of historical methodology, he put forward the theory of falsity-proving standard, and this standard of dividing scientific or non-scientific became the philosophy cornerstone of his historical methodology. Extending from this, Popper raised the history research technique of suspecting and refuting, whose concrete manifestation is the question-condition analyzing method; and he contrasted it with the subjective-reenacting method of R.G. Collingwood. Popper applied the error-trial method of natural science to the historical research, which caused the theory of the'fragmentary engineering doctrine'. He compared the'fragmentary engineering doctrine'with the'integral engineering theory', and pointed out the advantage of the former; this is helpful enlightenment to us. To talk about the'historical causal relation'popper advocated to make the explanation by considering general rules together with initial condition. On historical methodology, Popper advocated the unification of historical science and natural science, and he believed that the historical research needs to draw support from the universal rules of natural science.Once alive, the exploration will continue; this is the best resonance of Popper taking form his history thought, which infers in his works, such as The Poverty of Historicism, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Objective Knowledge: an Evolutionary Approach and so on. It lasted for 40 years that Popper's historical thought forms completely, which appears a more complete system. There displays mutual fusion among Popper's historical ontology, his historical epistemology and his historical methodology.From the viewpoint of multi-factor theory, this article examines the reason of Popper form his history thought. It is mainly affected by his time background, family environment, personal experience, political stand, scientific methodology and philosophy foundation. The most direct and also most important ones should be his philosophy foundationand his scientific methodology. Other factors may be considered as indirect and recessive influence.Lastly, this article makes a comprehensive appraisal to Popper's historical thought, and explains its enlightenment to us. The essence of Popper's history thought manifests for the historical epistemology and the historical methodology, the aontemporary influence of which mainly lays in that it provide us a new thinking method, and which is able to enlighten our historical understanding. Popper's history thought enlightens us a lot: There is no limits to the exploration of scientific theory and historical thought; and there should take critique attitude in historical research; and we should treat our own research results honestly.