Massimo Pigliucci on Paul Karl Feyerabend

“Paul Feyerabend was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century—unfortunately, I might add. While he was not a postmodernist (he reportedly did believe in an objective reality), his writings have given plenty of ammunition to post-modernists and even the few creationists who know who he was.”

“Here is what I think was very valuable in Feyerabend’s analysis, both as conducted in Philosophy of Nature and elsewhere in his writings. He was an iconoclast who was not afraid to think outside the box, way outside the box. And his criticism of science as a potentially dehumanizing (“alienating”) enterprise that lends itself to power games and ideological exploitation was right on the mark. He anticipated the modern phenomenon of scientism. It takes some serious intellectual guts to write a book like Philosophy of Nature, where one presents a sweeping rethinking of the entire history of Western philosophy and science, and — again — I’m glad I read the book. But Feyerabend seems to be perversely blind to some obvious answers to his own questions. At some point he claims that it is hard to fathom why Aristotelian physics gave out to its Galileian and Newtonian successor. Well, because Galileo and Newton were much closer than Aristotle to understanding how the world actually works, not to mention being able to make accurate experimental predictions.”