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2Reappraising FeyerabendStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 57 00-000. 2016.This volume is devoted to a reappraisal of the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It has four aims. The first is to reassess his already well-known work from the 1960s and 1970s in light of contemporary developments in the history and philosophy of science. The second is to explore themes in his neglected later work, including recently published and previously unavailable writings. The third is to assess the contributions that Feyerabend can make to contemporary debate, on topics such as perspectivi…Read more
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67The Contingency of Science and the Future of PhilosophyIn Eric Dietrich & Zach Weber (eds.), Essays in Philosophy, . pp. 312--328. 2011.Contemporary metaphilosophical debates on the future of philosophy invariably include references to the natural sciences. This is wholly understandable given the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences and their contributions to philosophical thought and practice. However such appeals to the sciences should be moderated by reflections on contingency of sciences. Using the work of contemporary historians and philosophers of science, I argue that an awareness of the radical contingency of…Read more
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Feyerabend on the Ineffability of RealityIn Asa Kasher & Jeanine Diller (eds.), Models of God and Other Ultimate Realities, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2013.This paper explores the account of ‘ultimate reality’ developed in the later philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. The paper has five main parts, this introduction being the first. Part two surveys Feyerabend’s later work, locates it relative to his more familiar earlier work in the philosophy of science, and identifies the motivations informing his interest in ‘ultimate reality’. Part three offers an account of Feyerabend’s later metaphysics, focusing on the account given in his final book, Conquest o…Read more
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75Oswald Spengler, Technology, and Human NatureThe European Legacy 17 (1). 2012.Oswald Spengler (1880?1936) is a neglected figure in the history of European philosophical thought. This article examines the philosophical anthropology developed in his later work, particularly his Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931). My purpose is twofold: the first is to argue that Spengler's later thought is a response to criticisms of the ?pessimism? of his earlier work, The Decline of the West (1919). Man and Technics overcomes this charge by providing a novel p…Read more
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1Doing Science an Injustice: Midgley on ScientismIn Ian James Kidd & Elizabeth McKinnell (eds.), Science and the Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary Midgley, Routledge. pp. 151-167. 2015.In this chapter, I offer an account of Midgley‘s critique of scientism that converges on the claim that, among its many faults, scientism is objectionable because it does science an injustice
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73Feyerabend on Science and EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 47 (3): 407-422. 2013.This article offers a sympathetic interpretation of Paul Feyerabend's remarks on science and education. I present a formative episode in the development of his educational ideas—the ‘Berkeley experience'—and describe how it affected his views on the place of science within modern education. It emerges that Feyerabend arrived at a conception of education closely related to that of Michael Oakeshott and Martin Heidegger—that of education as ‘releasement’. Each of those three figures argued that th…Read more
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831Phenomenology of Illness, Philosophy, and LifeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 62 56-62. 2017.An essay review of Havi Carel, 'Phenomenology of Illness' (OUP 2015).
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91Was Feyerabend a Postmodernist?International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (1): 55-68. 2016.ABSTRACTThis article asks whether the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike. After describing some superficial similarities between the style and content of both Feyerabend’s and postmodernist writings, I offer three more robust characterisations of postmodernism in terms of relativism, ‘incredulity to metanarratives’, and ‘depthlessness’. It emerges that none of these characterisations offers a strong jus…Read more
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120Why did Feyerabend Defend Astrology? Integrity, Virtue, and the Authority of ScienceSocial Epistemology 30 (4): 464-482. 2016.This paper explores the relationship between epistemic integrity, virtue, and authority by offering a virtue epistemological reading of the defences of non-scientific beliefs, practices, and traditions in the writings of Paul Feyerabend. I argue that there was a robust epistemic rationale for those defences and that it can inform contemporary reflection on the epistemic authority of the sciences. Two common explanations of the purpose of those defences are rejected as lacking textual support. A …Read more