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Feyerabend's unpublished dissertation
This dissertation is contains Feyerabend's first development of the notion of incommensurability. ... Read more

Product Description
This stimulating collection is devoted to the life and work of the most flamboyant of twentieth-century philosophers, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend's radical epistemological claims, and his stunning argument that there is no such thing as scientific method, were highly influential during his life and have only gained attention since his death in 1994. The essays that make up this volume, written by some of today's most respected philosophers of science, many of whom knew Feyerabend as students and colleagues, cover the diverse themes in his extensive body of work and present a personal account of this fascinating thinker. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Method in that madness
This series of essays reanimates the real Feyerbend, too often associated with a series of much denounced one-liners, such as the 'anything goes' pronouncement. In fact, Feyerbend rides the dialectical red zone in hairpin turns near the unexplored terrain where science fans, groupies, Darwin fanatics, and the 'anally overtrained' fear to tread, lest their weltanschaung be seen as Romantic poets once saw it. As a science fan myself, I can only watch in wonder and some sadness the 'social construction', in the age of Big Science, of something more sophisticated than, but not altogether different from, what the Church Fathers concocted from thin air, thereby freezing the minds of the many for millennia. It can't happen again, but it can attempt to happen again. That's the nice thing about science, you will lose all your paradigms, sooner better than later.

Where did that title really come from?
There is a very short explication of the title "The Worst Enemy ofScience" in the Preface (pp. v-vi, signed by Gonzalo Munevar), whereit is curtly stated:"Paul Feyerabend was once described in Nature as"The Worst Enemy of Science"."A more detailed referencethan this briefest of mentions is nowhere given in the whole book.Thebook naturally contains (like all Academic books) hundreds of other(scrupulously) full references of much lesser importance.What is theprecise Nature reference to Feyerabend as "The Worst Enemy ofScience"?Or is this a pure legend, perhaps invented by Feyerabendhimself (who loved exaggerations, farcical tricks, and hoaxes of the"Anything Goes" type) so as to bolster his well-deservednotoriety? ... Read more

Product Description
Criticism and the History of Science deals with Thomas Kuhn's, ImreLakatos's and Paul Feyerabend's criticism of Karl Popper's falsificationistconception of science. It argues that this criticism is based on two importantmethodological problems: the problem that observations and tests statementsare fallible and impregnated with theory, and the problem of how to testcomplex theoretical systems. In order to solve these problems it shows howproblematic test statements can be criticised and whole theoretical systemsfalsified. In this way the falsificationist conception of science is developedand defended in a way making a deeper understanding of science and its historypossible. ... Read more

Product Description
This book is the first comprehensive critical study of the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend's thought, beginning with his early attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein's conception of meaning onto Popper's falsificationist philosophy. The key elements of Feyerabend's model of the acquisition of knowledge are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend's early work emerges as a contribution to the historical approach to science with which he is usually associated. In his more notorious later work, Feyerabend claimed that there was, and should be, no such thing as the scientific method. The roots of Feyerabend's 'epistemological anarchism' are exposed and the weaknesses of his cultural relativism are brought out. Throughout the book, Preston discusses the influence of Feyerabend's thought on contemporary philosophers and traces his stimulating but divided legacy. The book will be of interest to students of philosophy, methodology and the social sciences. ... Read more