Philosophy of Nature 1st Edition by Paul K. Feyerabend (PDF)

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Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the ,Naturphilosophie.”The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Feyerabend was definitely one of the great thinkers of twentieth century philosophy.”―Philosophy Now”Feyerabend famously quipped that the only rule of method is that anything goes. Philosophy of Nature sheds light on his transition from critical rationalist to epistemological anarchist. Ranging from Stonehenge and Homer to Bohr and Einstein, the book creatively explores the relations of mythological thought to philosophy and science.”―Howard Sankey, University of Melbourne”In this book, we can see another side of this multi-faceted figure: Feyerabend as a historical philosopher of nature and as an analyst of the development of ancient Greek philosophy. This puts some of his apparently outrageous positions into perspective and reveals their sometimes quite sophisticated background.”―Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Leibniz Universität Hannover About the Author Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

⭐This was the beginning of a very ambitious project by Feyerabend — an historical account of how we have thought about and experienced reality, from Stone Age times to modern quantum theory. This was to be the first of (at least) three volumes. Unfortunately all we have is this one volume, still in draft form, although I think we are fortunate to have it at all.The Introduction by Heit and Oberheim is indispensable for understanding the context of the book. Usually, I’m not a fan of introductions, but this is well-written and well-needed. Feyerabend began the project in the 1970s, in the years leading up to the publication of his Against Method, still his major work. The aftermath of Against Method’s publication, responding to critics and refining his arguments, would consume him for years and may have kept him from getting back to and completing this project.This volume begins with the Stone Age, progresses through Homeric Greece, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and on up in mostly outline form through to modern and contemporary science.What exactly Feyerabend is tracing the development of is critical to understanding his thinking. In an early passage, he distinguishes what he calls “refined” epistemology from “naive” epistemology. A naive epistemology is one in which knowledge of reality is relatively unproblematic — the facts about the world are simply presented to human consciousness. Concepts arise from facts and allow us to describe those facts. Thus, reality itself determines our experience of it, and our conceptual knowledge of it. The relation between the two, knowledge and reality, is a simple, untroubled one.A refined epistemology is one in which reality does not determine our experience of it but is instead itself influenced by a host of factors, including language, social structures, religion, . . . This is the kind of epistemology we associate with Whorfian theories of language, constructivism, and overall a more contemporary, post-Kantian understanding of reality as something co-produced by human consciousness, social reality, and reality itself (however we can still talk about a “reality itself”).Feyerabend doesn’t so much argue for the “refined” epistemology as place himself within it. Actually, the book is short on traditional philosophical argument, even for Feyerabend. This may be partly a matter of its being an unfinished work, as well as his general disdain for traditional philosophical argument.In keeping with a refined epistemology, what Feyerabend is tracing the development of is not just how we think about nature in our theories, but how we experience it in everyday life, as informed as that experience is by language, social structures, and other factors. So, in a strong sense, it is “nature” itself that develops and changes over the course of history.Feyerabend distinguishes three stages — the Homeric, the philosophical, and the modern scientific. Homeric nature is experienced as “aggregate” — without essences or substances defining the nature of things, but rather a melange of experiences, actions, effects, all interfacing with one another without strict requirements of laws of nature or even large-scale logical structure.That experience is difficult to describe, since it isn’t our own. Feyerabend does his best to crawl inside Homeric poetry and Greek myth, to discover a different kind of sense that the world made to the pre-philosopical Greeks. He is adamant that this sense is every bit as legitimate (and complex) as our own, that within the poetry and the mythology there are ways of understanding and dealing with such things as seasons, chemical nature, etc. that may escape our current attention because we are simply not attuned to them.Likewise the Homeric age’s experience of self is quite different. In the Homeric world, the human mind was much more transparent than we think of it now. Events passed through any border between mind and world such that thoughts were not entirely autonomous. The will could be determined by events, ideas could arise by events outside the mind. Mind was within nature.But now, in the philosophical world, human consciousness is autonomous — it “interacts” with a world. “The separation liberated humans, it transformed them from a component of nature and society, directly subjected to the impact of both, into their observer and transformer. No longer was the world simply there; rather, it became something alien that had to be conquered anew, both conceptually and practically.”Feyerabend singles out Xenophanes and Parmenides as critical to the turn toward the philosophical. Xenophanes for the development of a notion of “experience” that depends upon this separation of human consciousness from the world, whereby the world is experienced by a human consciousness (with the help of interpretive principles and concepts that make it more than just a chaotic confusion). And Parmenides for the development of the notion of Being — the nonchangeable aspects of reality that later become the basis, in modern science, for the laws, elements, etc. that do not change and by which we can understand everything that does change.And Feyerabend stresses that the transition from the Homeric to the philosophical is not the result of an argument. It is historical change, in the full context of all that happens in historical change — political change, technological change, religious change, changes in social structures.He is a little short on detail here, but he does refer to a transition between local, immanent gods of Homeric times, and more abstract gods and principles. As civilizations expanded and conquests were made, what had been a local religion or god had to encompass a broader scope, retreating into more abstract terms as it did so.Feyerabend here is an historical thinker at the same time as he is an epistemologist, seeing the two as inseperable in a way reminiscent of Hegel. In fact, he recruits Hegel as a natural ally. Hegel’s Phenomenology in particular traces the history of knowing, whereby “reality” itself, what we experience, changes and develops. Feyerabend is doing something very similar here, and he is right to recruit Hegel as an ally.But for Feyerabend, unlike for Hegel, there is no progress. In fact, he seems to mourn the loss of Homeric experience. This philosophical separation of consciousness from world comes at a cost, inviting us to think of critiques of modern technology (e.g., Heidegger’s) as well as Feyerabend’s own critiques of a kind of scientific imperialism, in which all other “non-scientific” ways of experiencing and understanding the world are repressed, deemed suspect or outright illegitimate.Against Method and The Conquest of Abundance stand out as places to go to read more on this campaign for diversity in experience and understanding.It’s certainly a shame that Feyerabend was unable to finish this project. I know that his portrayal of the Homeric experience has taken its share of criticism. Fair enough, but that doesn’t invalidate his over-riding point that the philosophical and scientific experiences of the world are historical in nature, not simply the emergence of the victors against the dangers of superstition and irrationality. And that there may be much lost in our treating them as rightful victors.

⭐I must admit that, as a philosopher of science and scientist I have always been skeptical of “enfant terrible” Paul Feyerabend and his brand of methodological anarchism. Not because I don’t think Feyerabend didn’t make many good points when he rejected simplistic accounts of a monolithic (and inexistent) “scientific method,” or when he insisted in warning everyone about the dangers of trusting science too much (what we today call scientism). He was right, and indeed prescient, on those counts. But he couldn’t avoid overplaying his hand, getting carried away into areas that come perilously close to the endorsement of pseudoscience and the practice of pseudophilosophy. This book was published posthumously, and was originally intended as the first volume in a series of three. It is a breathtaking analysis of the whole history of Western thought, tracking the transitions between the “life forms” of myth and poetry (Homer), philosophy (Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes), and science (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr). There is much to be learned from Feyerabend’s treatment of this bewilderingly complex subject matter. Yet, ultimately, the book fails at its major intent: philosophy and then science have replaced myth and poetry as accounts of how the universe works for good reasons. They are immensely more successful, if perhaps somewhat dehumanizing and less appealing to commonsense. Still, a good and challenging read. Don’t just dismiss Feyerabend, engage him, and reject him for good solid reasons. That’s good philosophy. (A six-part series of essays on the book can be found at my blog, platofootnote dot org, searching for “Book Club: Philosophy of Nature.)

⭐For devotees!

⭐Great Book. Many thanks for delivering this. Much appreciated. Highly Recommend this book to others.

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