Mohsen Khademi
Abstract
Paul Karl Feyerabend is one of the extremely influential philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century that his controversial works and opinions have reduplicated his reputation. This is his provocative works led to a misunderstanding for some academics and experts in philosophy, ...
Read More
Paul Karl Feyerabend is one of the extremely influential philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century that his controversial works and opinions have reduplicated his reputation. This is his provocative works led to a misunderstanding for some academics and experts in philosophy, so that someone called him the Worst Enemy of Science. In this article I'm going to show that this idea isn't true: Feyerabend feels hostile towards neither science, nor any tradition else. He fights only against dogmatic and destructive ideologies. Generally speaking, Feyerabend's ideas express only his hostility to technocracy and chauvinism of science. According to Feyerabend, modern science has a lot in common with the Medieval Church. He would maintain that nowadays science has been turned into a rigid religion whose prophets are scientists, whose miracles scientific discoveries and whose judgements scientific statements. Then it's up to us to put science in its place in order to make room for other traditions and human knowledge.
aziz najafpoor; Fatemeh Gitipasand
Volume 7, Issue 13 , September 2017, , Pages 105-114
Abstract
In line with his cultural concerns and protecting various social traditions, Feyerabend denounces the rationality of modern science, emphasizes the principle of ‘anything goes’ and prioritizes individual freedom over the truth. Denying the absolute truth, Feyerabend tries to make room for ...
Read More
In line with his cultural concerns and protecting various social traditions, Feyerabend denounces the rationality of modern science, emphasizes the principle of ‘anything goes’ and prioritizes individual freedom over the truth. Denying the absolute truth, Feyerabend tries to make room for cultural pluralism and to remove science from the state of being the only reference for determining the authenticity of phenomena. In this paper, it is tried to show that Feyerabend in fact, after criticizing scientific rationality, raises a new rationality which its aim is freedom and has its own method and tradition. Besides some conflicts and ambiguities in his approach, he does not provide a reason for the preference of his rationality over other existing rationalities. We conclude that Feyerabend not only is not an epistemological anarchist, but has its own particular rationality.
Ali Azizi; Mostafa Taghavi
Volume 4, Issue 8 , March 2015, , Pages 59-74
Abstract
The viewpoints of Kuhn and Feyerabend, as two philosophers of science, are similar in many aspects, even the same in certain problems. They do not believe in any objective and universal rationality, hence, their views are regarded relativistic by many other philosophers. These two philosophers, belong ...
Read More
The viewpoints of Kuhn and Feyerabend, as two philosophers of science, are similar in many aspects, even the same in certain problems. They do not believe in any objective and universal rationality, hence, their views are regarded relativistic by many other philosophers. These two philosophers, belong to the second half of the twentieth century and are considered as a response to positivism and negativism. Despite the extensive correspondences, there are some significant differences between them. In this paper, we have tried to derive and analyze the criticisms of Feyerabend to Kuhn's viewpoint on science, such as critisizing the Kuhn's ideological approach to history, the domain of his incommensurability, the ambiguity in normativeness and descriptiveness of his ideas, unjustifiable transition from tenacity to proliferation, failure in discriminating between science and non-science via theoretical entities such as paradigm and normal science, and finally restricting the scientists’ freedom throughout the normal science.
