Ask a Specialist: Hacohen and Shearmur

Malachi Hacohen and Jeremy Shearmur are acknowledged outstanding specialists on Popper's intellectual development. They have kindly offered to make their knowledge and special research results available to you. All you have to do is ask your question, and you will receive a reply. The questions and answers will be stored in an archive that you can search, and in time this archive will become an increasingly important resource for researchers, students and the general public alike. We would ask you remember that these researchers are busy people and to please keep your question to a paragraph at most.

Hacohen will answer questions pertaining to pre-1945 and Shearmur will answer questions pertaining to post-1945.

Who Are Hacohen and Shearmur?

Jeremy Shearmur

Jeremy Shearmur is a Reader in Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University. He was educataed at the L.S.E., where he was taught by Popper (as well as by Musgrave, Watkins, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Gellner, and also attended Oakshott's graduate seminar). He subsequently worked for Popper as his assistant, from 1971-1979, and was closely involved in the production of Objective Knowledge., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (and Unended Quest), and The Self and its Brain, as well as on versions of the papers which went to form The Myth of the Framework, and numerous other articles. He has subsequently worked extensively in the Popper Archives at The Hoover Institution, Standford University, and is the author of The Political Thought of Karl Popper, London & New York, Routledge, 1996.

Shearmur has a general interest in Popper's work - particularly in his social and political thought, but also in other issues. He is interested both in his historical work and also in contemporary applications and developments of critical rationalism, and would be interested in supervision of Ph.D theses in this field, within the top-rated Graduate Program in Philosophy at the
Australian National University

Books by Jeremy Shearmur:

Malachi H. Hacohen

Malachi H. Hacohen is author of Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), an intellectual biography of the young Popper, which focuses on politics and philosophy in interwar Vienna as formative influences for Popper’s work. Hacohen is an associate professor of European intellectual history at Duke University. He has also taught at Columbia University (where he earned his Ph.D.), New York University, and Reed College and has lectured widely in Europe and North America. His research interests have focused thus far on German, Austrian, and French history, and have included social theory, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and the relationship of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and Jewish identity. He has published essays on Karl Popper, liberalism, Central European history, and the methodology of intellectual history in the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, History and Theory, and similar publications. His Karl Popper in Exile is available (in Italian) from Rubbettino (Biblioteca Austriaca). Hacohen plans to work next on trans-Atlantic liberalism during the Cold War and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The congress was the leading international organization of progressive anticommunist intellectuals and was clandestinely funded by the CIA. Hacohen has been a recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, Whiting, and other awards and will be a senior fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna in 2001. He is a coordinator of the Triangle Intellectual History Program (Duke, NCSU at Raleigh, UNC at Chapel Hill) and serves on the editorial board of The Critical Rationalist and on the program boards of the Vienna International Summer University and the Karl Popper Centenary Conference.