Popper

Summary

Dominique Pagani mainly returns to the reading of the history of philosophy that Popper gives in The Open Society and Its Enemies: there Plato, Rousseau and Hegel become totalitarian thinkers, which, in his view, amounts to making all of philosophy totalitarian1. He reproaches him for forgetting that the whole is not totalitarian2, for never having read Hegel, and for setting against him Locke, who justified slavery3. He places him, together with Bobbio, among the proponents of a dichotomous logic of friends and enemies of freedom, tied to Atlanticism and the Cold War4. On falsifiability, he answers that it has been known since Aristotle and Euclid, and he refuses to make the hard sciences the model for all knowledge. In the more recent sessions, he makes Popper the figure of the dominant neopositivism and of scientistic naturalism, whose targets are Marx and Freud, and whose "open society" passes over in silence the massacres in Vietnam and Korea56.

1. 1What is to be done? 2/329 Jan 2016 · 40:48
2. 2Hegel on the Beach 5/52 Feb 2016 · 2:24:21
3. 3Tribute to Domenico Losurdo2 Jul 2018 · 1:05:31
4. 4Tribute to Domenico Losurdo2 Jul 2018 · 34:10
5. 5#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?7 Jan 2021 · 44:36
6. 6Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire: is Michel Clouscard still relevant?23 May 2026 · 29:42

Summary produced automatically from 26 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.