Notes on Karl Popper (Brief Biography‪)‬

THERE ARE TIMES when any philosopher worth his metaphysics yearns nostalgically for the good old days. By the "good old days" one means the days of the Presocratic philosophers of Greece. Those esteemed thinkers, who dwelt chiefly in Asia Minor during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., seem to many modern philosophers to have lived in a great and primordial era of Western thought, a time when "wild and crazy" ideas floated around the Mediterranean--to be eventually passed down to the modern world. In that age, long before Plato and Aristotle, cosmology and mathematics were king. The names of Parmenides, Anaximander, Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, to name but a few major thinkers, were well known. These men had an almost mystical relationship with nature and continually ruminated on the origins of things.