Adam Woodcox

In this article, I examine Feyerabend’s conceptual anthropology, understood as the approach to studying genuinely alternative worldviews through immersion and field study of artistic, linguistic, and conceptual media. I argue that conceptual anthropology is Feyerabend’s answer to the question of how we should study the conceptual change that takes place when one conceptual system or theory is dissolved and replaced by another (e.g., the transition from the Aristotelian to the Copernican worldview). In contrast to a logical approach, which favors rational reconstruction and studies conceptual change with reference to dominant ideology, Feyerabend emphasizes the psychological, sociological, and cultural factors that influence conceptual change. I trace the development of Feyerabend’s anthropological approach from the early 1960s to the publication of Against Method.

This paper provides a sustained investigation into ancient teichopolitics – the politics of constructing walls – and the question of whether the best city should be surrounded by walls. Plato’s Laws adopts the Spartan view that walls have a negative effect on national character and argues that they should be ‘left lying asleep and undisturbed in the ground’. Aristotle’s Politics puts forward a series of objections to Plato and adopts the more pragmatic view that walls are necessary. Although both philosophers debate the status of walls and foreigners within the best city, they fail to draw the thoroughly modern connection between teichopolitics and immigration.

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the nature and role of logical (logikôs) argumentation in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. In contrast to the standard domain interpretation, which makes logikôs argumentation the contrary of phusikôs, relying on principles drawn from outside the domain of natural science, I propose that the essential or defining feature of logikôs argumentation is the use of principles that are general relative to the question under investigation. My interpretation is developed and illustrated with a close textual analysis of Aristotle’s explanation of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8.

Through a detailed analysis of the various modes of argumentation employed by Aristotle throughout his natural scientific works, I aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on the relation between Aristotle’s theory of science and his actual scientific practice. I challenge the standard reading of Aristotle as a methodological empiricist and show that he permits a variety of non-empirical arguments to support controversial theses in properly scientific contexts. Specifically, I examine his use of logical (logikôs) argumentation in the discussion of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8, rational (kata ton logon) argumentation in his discussion of cardiocentrism throughout the biological works, and the method of division in Posterior Analytics II 13.