Joseph Agassi

Joseph Agassi
יוסף אגסי
Agassi in 2007
Born
Joseph Birnbaum

(1927-05-07)7 May 1927
Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
Died22 January 2023(2023-01-22) (aged 95)
Herzliya, Israel
SpouseJudith Buber Agassi

Joseph Agassi (/ˈæɡəsi/; Hebrew: יוסף אגסי; born Joseph Birnbaum; 7 May 1927 – 22 January 2023) was an Israeli academic with contributions in logic, scientific method, and philosophy. He studied under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, where he completed his PhD in 1956 with a dissertation titled The Function of Interpretations in Physics.

Agassi taught in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1963. He later taught at the University of Illinois, Boston University, and York University in Canada. He had dual appointments in the last positions with Tel Aviv University.

Personal life and death

Agassi was born into a Haredi family who lived in Jerusalem's Buchari neighborhood. In his youth studied in the Mercaz haRav yeshiva in Jerusalem. Later he left religious life.[citation needed]

He was married to Judith Buber Agassi – Martin Buber's granddaughter – from 1949 until her death in 2018. Together they had two children, Tirzah, who died of cancer in March 2008, and Aaron. Agassi resided in Herzliya, Israel. Tirzah's name, when she was a child, was often used by Popper in his dictum "Write it for Tirzah!" to explain his view that everyone has the duty to write in a clearly and easily understandable language. Agassi died on 22 January 2023, at the age of 95.

Philosophy

Agassi's prime interest was in science, metaphysics, and politics. He took it that philosophy is nothing if not rationalist. For over fifty years he studied the rationality of science, metaphysics, and democratic politics.

An advocate of Popper's philosophy with variations, Agassi ignored many of the problems that concern some philosophers of science, chiefly that of theory choice. The problems of the philosophy of technology engaged him, including the problem of choosing scientific theories and ideas worthy of application and implementation.

Israeli politics

Agassi had expressed criticism against the settler movement and advocated for Israel to "separate" from the worldwide Jewish community:

The flimsy excuse – the notion that Israel belongs to the Jewish people and not to the Israeli nation – is the very threat to its independence. It is therefore imperative that Israel should recognize its nation as separate and different from the Jewish people.

He was close to Hillel Kook who advocated severely limiting the Right of Return, forming a "Hebrew Nation" and creation of a Constitution already in 1948. Agassi was very much influenced by these views.[citation needed]

Global politics

Agassi had written widely on global politics and on the methodology to implement global politics. His methodology was consistently procedural, without having requests for systematic procedures. His demands from those who design global politics are minimalist: small methodological changes may lead to large-scale achievements.

Agassi also proposed to bring global problems to public agendas for discussions in different forums, in particular in workshops where discussions are held with an agreed-upon agenda: the agenda, said Agassi, should be discussed and set by the participants prior to the discussion.

Publications

Books in English

Books in Hebrew

Books in Italian

Books edited

Online papers

  • A Note on Smith's Term "Naturalism"
  • Anthropomorphism in Science
  • Brainwashing
  • Bye Bye Weber
  • Can Adults Become Genuinely Bilingual?
  • Causality and Medicine
  • Deception: A View from the Rationalist Perspective
  • Deconstructing Post-Modernism: Gellner and Crocodile Dundee
  • Dissertation without tears
  • Halakha and Agada
  • Israeli Judaism
  • Jacob Katz on Jewish Social History
  • Karl Popper
  • Leibniz's Place in the History of Physics
  • Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Popper's Popular Critics
  • Liberal Forensic Medicine
  • Liberal Nationalism for Israel
  • Liberal Nationalism (Chapters from the book in Russian)
  • Movies Seen Many Times
  • Neo-Classical Economics as 18th Century Theory of Man
  • One Palestine [permanent dead link]
  • On the Limits of Scientific Explanation: Hempel and Evans-Pritchard
  • On the open grave of Hillel Kook
  • Prescriptions for Responsible Psychiatry
  • Quanta in Context
  • Rights and Reason
  • Science Education Without Pressure
  • Scientific Literacy
  • Summary of AFOS Workshop, 1994
  • Tautology and Testability in Economics
  • Technology: Philosophical and Social Aspects The Gro
  • Brundtland Report (1987) Or, The Logic of Awesome Decisions
  • The Heuristic Bent
  • The Interface of Philosophy and Physics
  • The Ivory Tower and the Seat of Power
  • The Lakatosian Revolution
  • The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel
  • The Novelty of Chomsky's Theories
  • Theoretical Bias in Evidence: a Historical Sketch
  • The Philosophy of Science Today
  • The Role of the Philosopher among the Scientists: Nuisance or Necessity?
  • The Theory and Practice of the Welfare State
  • To Save Verisimilitude
  • Training to Survive the Hazard Called Education
  • Variations on the Liar's Paradox
  • Verisimilitude
  • Who Discovered Boyle's Law?

References

  1. ↑ מילים אישיות לדמותו ולזכרו של פרופ׳ יוסף אגסי ז״ל שהלך הבוקר לעולמו (1927-2023) (in Hebrew)
  2. ↑ Agassi, Joseph (1956). The Function of Interpretations in Physics. London School of Economics and Political Science (PhD). Retrieved 14 May 2026.
  3. ↑ Ng, Margaret (2017), "Critical Rationalism Applied: A Footnote to The Siblinghood of Humanity", in Bar-Am, Nimrod; Gattei, Stefano (eds.), Encouraging Openness, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 325, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 243–249, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_20, ISBN 978-3-319-57668-8, retrieved 18 September 2022
  4. ↑ Levinson, Paul (1982). In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday. Humanities Press. ISBN 978-0-391-02609-4.
  5. ↑ Agassi, Joseph (1999). Liberal Nationalism for Israel: Towards an Israeli National Identity. Grefen Publishing House. p. 105. ISBN 978-1296041007.