Frictionless philosophy: Paul Feyerabend and relativism (original) (raw)

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL FEYERABEND

Historical Antecedents to the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, 2015

Paul Feyerabend has been considered a very radical philosopher of science for proposing that we may advance hypotheses contrary to well confirmed experimental results, that observations make theoretical assumptions, that all methodological rules have exceptions, that ordinary citizens may challenge the judgment of experts, and that human happiness should be a key value for science. As radical as these theses may sound, they all have historical antecedents. In defending the Copernican view, Galileo exemplified the first two; Mill, Aristotle and Machiavelli all argued for pluralism; Aristotle gave commonsense reasons for why ordinary citizens may be able to judge the work of experts; and a combination of Plato's and Aristotle's views can offer strong support for the connection between science and happiness.

A Dialogue on Relativism: Rorty and Feyerabend

Contemporary Pragmatism. Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 2014), 57–68, 2014

In this article, I first explore the strategies proposed by two authors to escape or evade relativism: Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend. I then present Rorty’s ethnocentric position and Feyerabend’s anthropological version, with the ultimate goal to evaluate pros and cons of both points of view. Are Rorty or Feyerabend escaping relativism, evading relativism, or are they simply offering us an uncomfortable dilemma?

FEYERABEND'S COSMOLOGICAL PLURALISM

Paul Feyerabend is often associated with a destructive criticism leading to an anarchism that flouts every rule and a relativism that treats all opinions as equal. This negative stereotype is based on ignorance and rumour rather than on any real engagement with his texts. Feyerabend's work from beginning to end turns around problems of ontology and realism, culminating in the outlines of a sophisticated form of pluralist realism. This largely unknown ontological turn taken by Feyerabend in the last decade of his life was based on four strands of argument: historical considerations, cosmological criticism, complementarity, and the primacy of democracy.

Feyerabend, Mill, and Pluralism

Philosophy of Science, 1997

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Reasons for Relativism. Feyerabend on 'the Rise of Rationalism' in Ancient Greece

Abstract : This paper argues that essential features of Feyerabend’s philosophy, namely his radicalization of critical rationalism and his turn to relativism, could be understood better in the light of his engagement with early Greek thought. In contrast to his earlier, Popperian views he came to see the Homeric worldview as a genuine alternative, which was not falsified by the Presocratics. Unlike socio-psychological and externalist accounts my reading of his published and unpublished material suggests that his alternative reconstruction of the ancient beginnings of the Western scientific tradition motivate and justify his moderate Protagorean relativism

Metaethical Moral Relativism and the Analogy with Physics

Praxis, 2008

Paper drawn from my BPhil dissertation (i.e. written while I was still a grad student in Philosophy in Oxford). Discusses metaethical moral relativism (MMR), and particularly the specific version known as " speaker-relativism ", advocated by philosophers like Gilbert Harman and James Dreier. Both authors draw an analogy between ethics and modern physics: just as Einstein showed that judgments about time or mass were always relative to a specific frame of reference, Dreier and Harman argue that " absolutist " judgments about moral rightness or wrongness need to be reinterpreted as relative to some particular moral system. They also claim that this analogy allows us to salvage ordinary moral talk. The paper aims to highlight some limits with that analogy, and concludes that MMR is best viewed as a variant of an error theory about morality, rather than as the distinct metaethical position it purports to be. Retrospectively, I find a number of flaws in this paper (some of which have been pointed out in a response by Ragnar Francen in the same journal), but continue to think that its core point is on the right track (though I would now develop it somehow differently than what I did then).