Mailbox
Today in Mailbox: Weather reports on Radio Prague’s website, delivery of Radio Prague’s parcels, listeners’ answers to our mystery person quiz, a brand new question for November. Listeners/readers quoted: Kevin Bridges, Alex Torbeni, Juan Carlos Gil Mongio, Hans Verner Lollike, Shahzad Shabbir, Mary Lou Krenek, Jahangir Alam, Jayanta Chakrabarty, Colin Law, Dipita Chakrabarty.
This one came from Kevin Bridges:
“Thank you for the very valuable service you offer of giving news also in English. I really appreciate this as my main source of news of what is happening in Czech. In the past at the end of the written news pages there was a short article about the weather. I always found this to be useful but unfortunately it seems that you now only have a report if there is something major happening. You also sometimes used to give an outlook for the next month. This was also very helpful. Do you still offer these two things maybe somewhere else on your website?”
Due to the changes to our news timeline which is now ordered chronologically, weather reports have been temporarily suspended – but a new tool will soon be introduced to our homepage featuring easy to understand weather icons as well as the temperatures for the particular day and the three following days. In the meantime you can look at Czech Radio’s main page, rozhlas.cz which already has that precise tool. You can find it on the right hand side, if you scroll down a little. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
As we experienced some problems with international postal services in recent months, we are always glad to hear that our parcels have been delivered safely. Alex Torbeni from Indonesia dropped us a line:
“I am happy to tell you that I have received a gift from Radio Prague today. The gift is a beautiful T-shirt. I am glad to be the winner of the September mailbox quiz. The parcel took only 15 days to reach me from the Czech Republic to Indonesia.”
As part of his reception report, our regular listener Juan Carlos Gil Mongio from Spain sent us his quiz answer, which brings us to our monthly listeners’ mystery person competition:
“I think Karl Raimund Popper is the Austrian-British philosopher you asked for. I remember I studied something about him at Secondary School, but I must admit I do not remember what it was. I have searched the web and found something about empiricism and scientific method which I did not understand, so I will wait for your program with the answers of other listeners to try to understand it all.”
“Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University, his mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. He is known for his philosophy of Science, which is a very important discipline, because it is of benefit to mankind and not a purpose in itself. …His grandparents were Jewish, but his parents converted to Lutheranism as part of an assimilation process while living in Vienna. The majority of Austrians are Catholic, but being an intellectual, Protestantism was the progressive thing to belong to. As an adult Karl Popper was an agnostic, but elements in his thinking are defined by the ‘Christian’ vocabulary.”
Shahzad Shabbir from Pakistan adds:
“Sir Karl Raimund Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinised by decisive experiments.”
Mary Lou Krenek from the United States elaborates on that:
“His principle contribution to philosophy is his rejection of the inductive method in the empirical sciences. He rejected the traditional conception of induction which held that a scientific hypothesis may be verified through the accumulation of confirming observations, arguing instead that scientific hypotheses can be best only falsified.
“He was a philosopher of open society and a defender of the democratic system of government. In a 1992 interview with the Sunday Times in London, he remarked on the collapse of the Marxist states of Eastern Europe--’I will not except to say I told you so. I just knew these were beastly regimes and I kept saying so, that is all.’
Jahangir Alam from Bangladesh writes:
“Sir Karl Raimund Popper was born on 28th July 1902 in Vienna and died in London 17th September 1994. He received a primary school teaching diploma in 1925 and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928 under the supervision of Karl Buhler. He was appointed as Professor of logic and scientific method at University of London.”
As usual, Jayanta Chakrabarty from India sent us an extensively researched answer from which we quote:
“…Although in his early years he was impressed by the doctrines of Marxism but after witnessing the unfortunate death of eight of his party colleagues in a street firing alleged to have been instigated by the communists, he became disillusioned by the ideals of pseudo-scientific materialism. Soon a profound change came in young Popper's mind making him an ardent follower in social liberalism.
“…Though recognized as a frontline authority in his preferred field, Karl Popper was also a prolific writer in social, political and historical spheres. Among his famous works are ‘Objective Knowledge’ and The Open Society and Its Enemies’ which are catalogued in most national libraries around the world.
“His influence extended beyond academics to create the formation of liberal democratic ideas which embraced all major democratic political ideologies. These principles of social culture paved the way for philanthropic foundations like the ‘Open Society Institutes’ and libertarian movements like ‘Taking Children Seriously’ – something unique for the early twentieth century.”
In his long and detailed answer, Colin Law from New Zealand writes about Popper’s New Zealand connection:
“In 1928 Karl Popper earned a doctorate in psychology. He was concerned by the rise of Nazism and in 1935 and 1936 he went to England to study which resulted in an opportunity in 1937 for him and his wife to go to New Zealand.
“From 1937 to 1946 Popper lectured in Philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was there that he wrote his classic work ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’. One reviewer suggests that when Popper was told to stop using university notepaper for his personal researches he fought back and as a result he is credited with having introduced Canterbury's tradition of first-rate research in philosophy. In 1946, soon after the war, Popper returned to England, where he remained with the London School of Economics.
“Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and invested as Companion of Honour in 1982. In 1980 he was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
“Sir Karl Popper died in Croydon, Greater London, on 17 September 1994 at the age of 92 from complications of cancer, pneumonia and liver failure. He was cremated and his ashes were buried alongside his wife in the Henninger family grave in Lainzer Cemetery, Vienna.”
And Dipita Chakrabarty from India adds:
“One of the many intricacies that Karl Popper solved is the philosophical problem of induction which has eluded an answer for many years. He put up a logical solution: ‘While there is no way to prove that the sun will rise, it is possible to formulate the theory that the sun will rise. If it does not rise some day, then the theory will be falsified and has to be replaced by a different one’.”
Thank you very much for your contributions and this time a Radio Prague prize goes to our regular listener Mary Lou Krenek from Texas. Congratulations! And here’s another mystery person for you to disclose:
This time we would like to know the name of the Austrian violinist who was born in 1838 in the Moravian city of Brno but went on to live and perform in several European capitals. Interestingly, she is mentioned in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”.
Please send us her name by November 26th to the usual address [email protected] which as you know is also the address for your queries and reception reports. A quick and easy way to comment on our stories is to do so on our Facebook page. We’ll be looking forward to your feedback and until next month, happy listening and take care.
