Consciousness - Popper's Contribution

[opening paragraph}: Popper, who was 92 when he died on 17 September 1994, was widely acclaimed as the greatest philosopher of science and by many as the greatest philosopher of any kind of the twentieth century. His most outstanding achievement was probably his solving of the age-old problem of induction (Popper, 1959). He showed that there is no such thing. Induction does not exist. Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, had succeeeded in proving that experience and reason have no necessary connection with one another (Hume, 1888, Book I, Part III, section vi). There is no such thing as rational belief. Kenneth Clark described this in his Civilisation as ‘an intellectual time bomb which, after sizzling away for almost two hundred years, has only just gone off.’ (Clark, 1969, p. 274.)