Feyerabend’s Farewell to Critical Rationalism – Gastvortrag von Matteo Collodel

Zum 100. Geburtstag des Philosophen Paul K. Feyerabend laden das Karl-Popper-Archiv der Universitätsbibliothek und die Philosophische Gesellschaft Klagenfurt am Donnerstag, 25. April 2024 um 18 Uhr (HS 3), herzlich zum englischsprachigen Gastvortrag von Matteo Collodel (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) ein:

Feyerabend‘s Farewell to Critical Rationalism: Chronicle of a Long Goodbye

By combining the positive insights of past scholarship with the results of extensive research work on Feyerabend’s Nachlass, this lecture strives to illuminate Feyerabend’s enduring efforts to emancipate himself from the yoke of his intellectual bond to Popper.

After his university studies in post-war Vienna and London, Feyerabend became known in academic philosophy in the second half of the 1950s for his contributions to the philosophy of quantum theory, developed in critical dialogue with Popper. Feyerabend’s philosophical breakthrough, however, came only in the first half of the 1960s, when he abandoned the philosophy of quantum theory due to the negative reception that his work had met and focused on the methodology of science. Reviving intuitions dating back to his formative years within a critical rationalist framework, Feyerabend advanced his research program of theoretical pluralism as an enhanced version of Popper’s falsificationism.

Feyerabend’s novel position — which he had provisionally called “hedonism”, “anarchism”, “dadaism”, or “new liberalism” — was fully displayed under the rubric “epistemological anarchism” in his controversial book Against Method (1975), in which Feyerabend’s criticism of Popper also acquired vicious overtones. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Feyerabend explored the political implications of his anti-methodological perspective and targeted Popper and the Popperian School in increasingly vocal terms. Trying to dispel Popper’s suspicion concerning the totalitarian dangers inherent in it, Feyerabend emphasized the relativist component of his epistemological anarchism, outlining the political model of a pluralistic Free Society.