Joseph Agassi


Joseph Agassi is an Israeli academic with contributions in logic, scientific method, and philosophy. He studied under Karl Popper and taught at the London School of Economics. He later taught at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Illinois, Boston University, and York University in Canada. He had dual appointments in the last positions with Tel Aviv University.
He was married to Judith Buber Agassi - Martin Buber's granddaughter - from 1949 until her death in 2018. Together they had two children, Aaron, and Tirzah, who died of cancer in March 2008. They currently live 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.

Philosophy

Agassi's prime interest is in science, metaphysics, and politics. He takes 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 ignores many of the problems that concern some philosophers of science, chiefly that of theory choice. The problems of the philosophy of technology engage him, including the problem of choosing scientific theories and ideas worthy of application and implementation.

Political philosophy

Agassi suggests, in line with Popper's political philosophy, that all schools of thought have thus far neglected the one major practical problem of ethics, namely moral brakes: when should one apply them? We know this much: the more decent people are, the sooner they are ready to put their brakes on. For example, Agassi observes that the German nation lost its moral brakes as soon as its Nazi rulers showed their hand.
According to Agassi, democracy is so outstanding that, no matter what the agenda is, it is still best. He developed further the methodology of critical rationalism which he adopted from Popper. According to him, critical rationalism gives the possibility to rationalists to account for checks and balances and democracy within their rationalism. Bootstrapping is the expression he coined for the approach to problems with the methodology of critical rationalism: Solutions are offered and then improved upon according to the results obtained as a never ending process. He acknowledges that even democracy is not immune to errors, and that it may even lead to its own destruction as it happened in 1933 in Germany. Nevertheless, says Agassi, democracy has a fair chance for success; in particular, in global politics due to its quick recovery procedure for confronting mistakes that find their way into the agenda of democratic institutions.

Israeli politics

Agassi has expressed criticism against the settler movement and has advocated for Israel to "separate" from the world-wide Jewish community:

Global politics

Agassi has written widely on global politics and on the methodology to implement global politics. His methodology is consistently procedural, without having requests for systematic procedures. His demands from those that design global politics are minimalist: small methodological changes may lead to large scale achievements.
Agassi also proposes 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, says Agassi should be discussed and set by the participants prior to the discussion.

Publications

Books in English