Farewell to Reason

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Farewell to Reason
Author Paul Feyerabend
LanguageEnglish
Subjects History of science
Epistemology
ancient philosophy
Publisher New Left Books
Publication date
1987
Media typePrint (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages327
ISBN 0860918963
Preceded byScience as Art 
Followed byThree Dialogues on Knowledge 

Farewell to Reason is a 1987 book by the Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. The book includes some reprinted essays published in other venues and was published by Verso Books, which also published Against Method and Science in a Free Society . The primary goal of the book is to trace the historical origins of "rationalism" and argue for a version of relativism and cultural diversity.

Contents

Translations

Farewell to Reason has been translated into numerous languages: [1]

The book was reprinted in 1988, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1999. [2] A 2nd edition was released including a new preface by Feyerabend.

Content

Farewell to Reason begins with a lengthy chapter on relativism. He distinguishes it from absolutism, or the view that some views are entirely truth and their alternatives are false, pluralism, where multiple views are held simultaneously without critical interaction, and scientific pluralism where different traditions must critically engage with one another. [3] He argues that there is no reason to necessarily accept science over other traditions [4] and that traditions can learn from one another. [5] Conintuing on arguments made in Science in a Free Society, Feyerabend spells out the political implications of relativism including the claim that all traditions should be given equal access to resources necessary to develop their traditions. [6] He continues by situating his relativism within a historical tradition including Herodotus, Protagoras, and several democratic theorists.

The second chapter argues that Xenophanes, who was praised by Karl Popper for inventing scientific rationalism, never provides an argument against the Homeric gods. [7] Rather, Xenophanes begs the question and assumes that defenders of the Homeric worldview accept that there can be a single God. Xenophanes, rather than inventing rational criticism, provides an instructive episode in the history of relativism. [8]

This is followed by several chapters that are reprinted essays on various topics including the role of theories in simplifying nature (a theme that would be explored in more detail in Conquest of Abundance ), creativity, progress in the sciences, arts, and philosophy, Mach's principle, incommensurability, Aristotle's theory of mathematics, and critical reviews of some of Popper's books.

The final parts of the book include a lengthy letter where he argues, amongst other things, that cultural exchanges do not require shared assumptions or a shared language [9] as well as a titular essay where he argues that philosophy should be abandoned as a practice and replaced by participation in particular traditions. [10]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is a position which encompasses many varieties such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Falsifiability</span> Property of a statement that can be logically contradicted

Falsifiability is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Popper</span> Austrian-British philosopher of science (1902–1994)

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".

Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as Early Greek Philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of these early philosophers spanned the workings of the natural world as well as human society, ethics, and religion. They sought explanations based on natural law rather than the actions of gods. Their work and writing has been almost entirely lost. Knowledge of their views comes from testimonia, i.e. later authors' discussions of the work of pre-Socratics. Philosophy found fertile ground in the ancient Greek world because of the close ties with neighboring civilizations and the rise of autonomous civil entities, poleis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imre Lakatos</span> Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the "research programme" in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Feyerabend</span> Austrian philosopher of science (1924–1994)

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol (1955–1958); afterwards, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades (1958–1989). At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1967), the FU Berlin (1968), Yale University (1969), the University of Auckland, the University of Sussex (1974), and, finally, the ETH Zurich (1980–1990). He gave lectures and lecture series at the University of Minnesota (1958-1962), Stanford University (1967), the University of Kassel (1977) and the University of Trento (1992).

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leo Strauss</span> German-American political philosopher (1899–1973)

Leo Strauss was a German-American scholar of political philosophy who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xenophanes</span> Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher (c.570–c.478 BC)

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer from Ionia who travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early Classical Antiquity.

Critical rationalism is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Karl Popper on the basis that, if a statement cannot be logically deduced, it might nevertheless be possible to logically falsify it. Following Hume, Popper rejected any inductive logic that is ampliative, i.e., any logic that can provide more knowledge than deductive logic. In other words if we cannot assert it logically, we should at the least try to logically falsify it, which led Popper to his falsifiability criterion.

In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It also examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience and other products of human activity, like art and literature and beliefs. The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be termed "scientific" in topics such as education and public policy.

Commensurability is a concept in the philosophy of science whereby scientific theories are said to be "commensurable" if scientists can discuss the theories using a shared nomenclature that allows direct comparison of them to determine which one is more valid or useful. On the other hand, theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages do not overlap sufficiently to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other. Discussed by Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s, and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, the problem of incommensurability results in scientists talking past each other, as it were, while comparison of theories is muddled by confusions about terms, contexts and consequences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Albert</span> German philosopher

Hans Albert is a German philosopher. Born in Cologne, he lives in Heidelberg.

<i>Against Method</i> 1975 book by Paul Feyerabend

Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge is a 1975 book by Austrian-born philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. The central thesis of the book is that science should become an anarchic enterprise. In the context of the work, the term "anarchy" refers to epistemological anarchy, which does not remain within one single prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would restrict scientific progress. The work is notable in the history and philosophy of science partially due to its detailed case study of Galileo's hypothesis that the earth rotates on its axis and has since become a staple reading in introduction to philosophy of science courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans-Joachim Niemann</span> German philosopher

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<i>The Man of Reason</i> 1984 book by Genevieve Lloyd

The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy is a book about the association between maleness and reason in western philosophy by the Australian philosopher Genevieve Lloyd. The work received positive reviews. It has been called a twentieth century classic of feminist thought, and is widely read in the Nordic countries.

<i>Science in a Free Society</i> Book by Paul Feyerabend

Science in a Free Society is the 2nd full length book by the Austrian philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. It was published in 1978 by Schocken Books and later reprinted by Verso Books. While Feyerabend never published a second edition, Verso pressed four copies in 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1987.

References

  1. "The Works of P. K. Feyerabend".
  2. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). pp. inside flap.
  3. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). pp. 21–2.
  4. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 36.
  5. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 20.
  6. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 39.
  7. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 96.
  8. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 101.
  9. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 273.
  10. Feyerabend, Paul K. (1987). Farewell to Reason (1 ed.). p. 319.