The Worst Enemy of Science?: Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend 1st Edition by John Preston (PDF)

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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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The attractive and unique feature of this collection of essays is the editors’ balanced and careful presentation of the life and work of such a divisive figure…strongly recommended.”―Choice”…a very useful introduction to Feyerabend…a very solid collection.”―Complete Review About the Author John Preston is at University of Reading. Gonzalo Munevar is at Evergreen State College, Washington.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐No, of course, Paul Feyerabend was not an “enemy of science”. Certanly, he was the enemy of the positivist paradigm of science, that is (or was before him?) predominanant in the realm of English-language science. I believe, that in the long term, he would help to win even posthumously the English-language philosophy of science to cure itself from its century-long tradition of (sorry!) its dull empiricism. Without too much battle over words, even “condescending” to the plain vocabulary of his readers (“science-supermarket” – Oh, mein Gott !), he succeeded to introduce the most sublime Hegelian dialectics (under the lable of “relativism”), and the most boisterous part of Nietzsche’s anti-rationalism (“gaia scienza” = “anything goes”), and, playing with word and concepts, methinks, gave the heirs of the most diehard epiricists a fine taste of German metaphysics, that they would be already unable to forget.

⭐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.

⭐There is a very short explication of the title “The Worst Enemy of Science” in the Preface (pp. v-vi, signed by Gonzalo Munevar), where it is curtly stated: “Paul Feyerabend was once described in Nature as “The Worst Enemy of Science”.” A more detailed reference than this briefest of mentions is nowhere given in the whole book. The book naturally contains (like all Academic books) hundreds of other (scrupulously) full references of much lesser importance. What is the precise Nature reference to Feyerabend as “The Worst Enemy of Science”? Or is this a pure legend, perhaps invented by Feyerabend himself (who loved exaggerations, farcical tricks, and hoaxes of the “Anything Goes” type) so as to bolster his well-deserved notoriety?

⭐Good book. Thank you

⭐

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