- Feyerabend on Free Will and Belief
- Scientific Laws as a Myth
- Philosophy Changes Practice
- John Stuart Mill on Pluralism
- Feyerabend on Popper
Different quotes from ‘The Tyranny of Science‘ and ‘Problems of Empiricism‘
Feyerabend on Free Will and Belief
From book Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science
Chapter 1. Conflict and Harmony.
p. 19. “However, there are lots of questions we can ask. Was it good that the ancient philosophers turned the traditional gods into Thought, Fire and unchanging blocks of Being? Was the change they recommended initiated by them or were they swept along by forces that they did not notice and over which they had no control? If so, what were these forces? Can we free ourselves from their influence or can we bend them so that they serve our wishes? And, if the latter, what are our wishes? Should we support the consequences of this gradual petrification of life and welcome the insights that came with it or should we look for something better? Does it really matter what we think?”
p. 26. “QUESTION. Do you believe in God?
FEYERABEND. I don’t know. But I am certainly not an atheist or conceited agnostic; it takes a whole life to find out about these matters. I have a feeling that some kind of supreme bastard is around there somewhere. I’m working on it.”
Scientific Laws as a Myth
A quote from the Chapter 3, The Abundance of Nature, Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science
p. 68. “Science, we are told, is very successful. And, so the tale continues, its success is due to observation and experiment. Well, in the last lecture, I gave you examples that throw serious doubt on this assumption. Important scientific principles were introduced against experience (or, later, experiment), not in conformity with it. One of the most basic principles is that there are laws which are valid independently of space, time, temperature and which hold during the first fractions of a second of our universe as well today. Now if that is not a big myth, then I really don’t know what is!”
Paul Feyerabend, Philosophical Papers, (Problems of Empiricism, Chapter 7, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations).
Philosophy Changes Practice
p. 130. “Finally, a critical comment on Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy. Wittgenstein assumes that philosophers want to provide a theory of already existing things, and he is correct in pointing out that what exists is much more complicated than any philosophical theory. However, philosophical theories have not merely reflected things but have changed them, i.e. the (sham) conflict between theory and practice was resolved by a change of practice. This fact refutes the idea that philosophers, and for that matter all mythmakes, only erect castles in the air, and introduces a fruitful relativism of the kind explained in my Erkenntnis für Freie Menshen (Frankfurt, 1980).”
John Stuart Mill on Pluralism
John Stuart Mill according to Feyerabend in Philosophical Papers, (Problems of Empiricism, Chapter 4, Two models of epistemic change: Mill and Hegel).
p. 65 “What has made the European family of nations as improving, instead of a stationary, portion of a mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause, but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who traveled in different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest would have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other’s development have rarely any permanent success, and each has in time endured to receive the good which the others have offered. Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted in this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development”.
Also Feyerabend’s quote from the preface
“The reader will notice that some articles defend ideas which are attacked in others. This reflects my belief (which seems to have been held by Protagoras) that good arguments can be found for the opposite side of any issue.”
Feyerabend on Popper
Feyerabend has a review Popper’s Objective Knowledge (Problems of Empiricism) where he concludes:
“At first reading, Popper’s book makes a tremendous impression. This impression has blinded some of its already not too clearsighted reviewers. But look at the reasons given and the doctrine proposed, consider the progress made in all fields, and especially in methodology, since the publication of Popper’s opus magnum, consider its predecessors, such as Mill and other thinkers of the nineteenth century, and you will be surprised to see how difficult it is to find a moderately acceptably argument, how often blunt assertions, equivocation, rhetorical questions take the place of rational discourse, how little more recent discoveries are taken into account and how small the difference is between the valuable parts of his book and the views of his predecessors. We are not too far from the truth when saying that with Objective Knowledge Popper’s research programme has entered its degenerating phase”.