Abstract
Henry George Forder (1889–1981) was a New Zealand mathematician working mainly on geometry. During Popper’s time at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand, Forder worked at Auckland University College. (For further biographical information on Forder cf. Butcher, 1985.) From their correspondence it appears that even though they worked in the same country, they mainly communicated by mail and did not meet in person, at least not regularly. Their correspondence is especially significant for understanding the genesis of Popper’s novel views on logic. Their conversations revolve mainly around physics, the nature and foundation of mathematics, Boolean algebra and formal logic. They discuss results and systems by Bernays, Brouwer, Carnap, Gentzen, Godel, Hilbert, Lewis, Russell and Tarski. Forder assists Popper in his research by making articles available to him that he did not have access to in Christchurch. Many of Popper’s inferential definitions are inspired by analogous definitions of operations in Boolean algebras, and one can glimpse the germination of this idea in the correspondence between Popper and Forder, for example in the letter of 7 May 1943.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Popper, K.R., Forder, H.G. (2022). Popper’s Correspondence with Henry George Forder. In: Binder, D., Piecha, T., Schroeder-Heister, P. (eds) The Logical Writings of Karl Popper. Trends in Logic, vol 58. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94926-6_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94926-6_26
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-94925-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-94926-6
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)