Filozoficzne Aspekty Genezy

Paul Feyerabend and Marxism

2024-04-18T12:58:41+02:00

This article discusses the relationship between Paul Feyerabend and Marxism. Feyerabend mentioned, referenced, quoted, discussed or commented on the following Marxists, communists or leftists in his writings: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, MAO, Fidel Castro, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Walter Hollitscher, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Needham, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Cohn-Benit and Robin Blackburn. On numerous occasions he discussed and commented on Dadaism, Marxism, communism, anarchism, liberalism, dialectical materialism, reductive materialism and, especially, eliminative materialism. He originated a Dadaistic philosophy, and in particular a Dadaistic epistemology. He did not convert to dialectical materialism; nevertheless, Dadaism seems highly relevant to Marxism and communism. As a Dadaist in philosophy he could well have been a Marxist, a non-Marxist, or an anti-Marxist.

Pluralism and Mysticism in the Thought of Paul K. Feyerabend

2024-03-23T12:00:08+01:00

Feyerabend’s positions regarding methodological pluralism and the consequent critique of the monism of Method proposed by the Popperian school are well known. Less analyzed is the significance of his scientific pluralism and the idea that a multiplicity of cognitive approaches to reality is possible, especially in relation to its “abundance” — the many ways in which it presents itself, its complexity, and the fact that consequently it can be approached and interpreted from different points of view. This aspect has led Feyerabend’s reflections to emphasize what is typically relegated to the realm of the irrational, and has enabled him to discover the extent of the unspoken and implicit aspects of scientific knowledge, thereby emphasizing the mystical dimension of humanity’s relationship with the world, which usually escapes rational analysis.

Riffing on Feyerabend: Direct Observation, Paraconsistentist Logic, and a Research Immanent Account of the Rationaliy of Science

2024-02-15T17:04:05+01:00

Feyerabend’s work, particularly his early papers contain important insights into the nature of science and scientific progress. I discuss his insights into the limits of empiricist foundationalism and positivism. I explain how the work of a number of philosophers has borne out Feyerabend’s claims in startling and interesting ways. Nevertheless, I criticise Feyerabend’s move from his attack on universal method to relativism. I point out that Feyerabend never confronted a well-developed research immanent view of the rationality of scientific change, which shows the limitations of the arguments in Against Method.

Knowledge without Epistemology

2024-04-27T13:09:47+02:00

The universality of scientific principles, theories, laws is never purely “objective”, it has a strong anthropological component. A theory of knowledge invoking transhistorical agencies is therefore not only dead — it was never alive; its so-called successes are nothing but an immense chimera. Scientific research knows no universal boundary conditions or standards whether of a conventional, aprioristic, or empirical kind but uses and invents rules according to circumstance without regarding the selection as a separate “epistemic” act and often without realising that an important choice is being made.

What is Epistemological Anarchism?

2024-04-11T12:49:41+02:00

Epistemological anarchism is a methodological fallibilism, i.e. an approach according to which all scientific knowledge is not only provisional, but so are the methods of acquiring it. It is a belief that we are doomed to a provisional character of knowledge, yet the guide to this provisionality is a selected methodology. This conviction is contrasted with the belief that not only are we doomed to a provisional character of knowledge, but that we have no permanent guide to this provisional knowledge.

Paul Feyerabend’s Contribution: The Anarchic Sunset of the Philosophy of Science

2024-03-08T17:52:59+01:00

Abstract: The author places Feyerabend's contribution within a line of thought on science that ideally opens with the Wienerkreis, and which in some way ends with Feyerabend. This trend has always been based on a series of demarcations, ranging from the opposition between meaningful and meaningless statements (the Vienna Circle), or between scientific and non-scientific statements (Popper), or between normal and extraordinary science (Kuhn), to the demarcation between progressive and regressive research programs (Lakatos) — up until Feyerabend, the former student of Popper, who puts an end to the perspicuity of every demarcation. The conclusion that “anything goes” when it comes to doing rigorous science marks the clearly unsuccessful conclusion of this large-scale historical trend. Philosophical attention thus shifts from descriptions of the scientific method to an analysis of the concrete historical production of scientific ideas and discoveries, in a movement that rehabilitates a Hegelian, historical approach in the empirical sciences.

The author outlines the contemporary approach that no longer sees the whole of knowledge and scientific practice as a series of methodologies aimed at faithfully mirroring nature, construing it instead as a thought-constituted organism subject to Darwinian criteria of selection and mutation. The biological metaphor of the organism that survives by adapting to external reality replaces the claim to foundational scientific validity on the basis of a priori paradigms.

Feyerabend’s Criticisms of Kuhn

2024-02-09T16:52:52+01:00

This paper gives an account of Feyerabend’s criticisms of Kuhn. The main exposition of these criticisms is in Feyerabend’s paper in the 1970 collection Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. However, another source consists of two letters from Feyerabend to Kuhn written in the period 1960–1961, which were published by Hoyningen-Huene in 1995. The paper contains a comparison of Feyerabend’s 1970 criticisms with the earlier ones in his letters to Kuhn. Kuhn replied to Feyerabend’s criticisms in his contribution to the 1970 collection. However, I claim that Feyerabend’s criticisms have considerable force, and Kuhn succeeds in answering some, but not all of them. In Section 5 of the paper, I try to answer Feyerabend’s criticisms of Kuhn by reviving the old empiricist idea of the inductive justification of scientific theories by the results of observations and experiments (observation statements). This leads to a position which is called empirical rationalism, and which is perhaps Kuhnian in character without being exactly the same as Kuhn’s own views.

We Can Choose to Live in a World that Makes Sense to Us

2024-02-02T16:14:19+01:00

The Legacy of Paulus Empiricus

2023-09-28T21:21:36+02:00

Feyerabend: The Most Valuable Philosopher of the Twentieth Century

2023-11-10T23:04:58+01:00

This chapter will argue that Paul K. Feyerabend is the most valuable philosopher of the twentieth century. Given the extraordinary importance of science in the twentieth century, the most valuable philosopher of the century should be someone who has given us the most significant understanding of the nature of science and its impact on the rest of the human experience — Feyerabend did precisely that. I will contrast his accomplishments with those of other important philosophers such as Kuhn, Popper, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Rawls, Carnap, Quine, Russell, and Dewey. Of critical importance in this regard will be Feyerabend’s case for theoretical pluralism, which overturned key ideas from analytical philosophy by demonstrating that all scientific rules, no matter how sound and empirically fruitful, must allow for exceptions. Science as we know it could not have progressed without scientists breaking well-established methodological norms. He argues, with Galileo, that observation assumes theory. As Feyerabend tells us, “We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream-world)”.