Zum 100. Geburtstag des Philosophen Paul K. Feyerabend fand am Donnerstag, 25. April 2024, der englischsprachige Gastvortrag von Matteo Collodel (Universität Ca’ Foscari Venedig) statt. Die Einladung erfolge durch das Karl-Popper-Archiv mit Unterstützung der Philosophischen Gesellschaft Klagenfurt und der Karl Popper Foundation Klagenfurt. Der Vortrag behandelte die Zusammenarbeit und Distanzierung von Paul Feyerabend und Karl Popper.

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 Karl 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.

Zum Vortragenden: http://www.collodel.org/home/

Der Gastvortrag ist Teil der weltweiten Veranstaltungen anlässlich des Paul Feyerabend Centennial 2024: https://sites.google.com/view/pkf2024/home