Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

Philosophy of Nature by Paul Feyerabend

Massimo Pigliucci says the bad boy of philosophy of science has done it again, posthumously.

I must admit that it took me some time to come around to seeing that Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) actually had something interesting, even important, to say about science and philosophy. When I was a young scientist interested in philosophy of science I eagerly read Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and even enjoyed their disagreements about doing prescriptive philosophy (that is, telling scientists how to do science properly, à la Popper), versus focusing on a descriptive program (that is, studying how scientists actually do science, à la Kuhn). But when I got to Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975) I was tempted, to quote David Hume, to consign it to the flames, since it appeared to me to contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Then the years passed, and with age and experience my thinking about the nature of science got a bit wiser. And more recently I was asked to write a series of commentaries on an interesting paper by Ian Kidd titled ‘Why Did Feyerabend Defend Astrology? Integrity, virtue, and the authority of science’ (Social Epistemology 30, 2016), in which I found myself to be somewhat sympathetic to Feyerabend’s concerns.

…