![]() Popper, who railed against certainty in science and politics, pounded the table and insisted that he was not dogmatic. Popper and Kuhn both fell into this trap in their interviews with me. Smirking at the camera, he seemed to be plotting some great mischief.Īll philosophical skeptics are vulnerable to self-contradiction. Feyerabend, whom the physicists called science’s “worst enemy," looked especially subversive. The essay featured photographs of three "betrayers of the truth”: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. They blamed this trend on philosophers who deny that science discovers objective, absolute truths. In a 1987 essay in Nature, "Where Science Has Gone Wrong," two British physicists fretted over the public’s growing antipathy toward science. Below is an edited version of my write-up of one of the most challenging, entertaining thinkers I’ve ever met. I like to emphasize all the ways in which things are getting better (see for example “ Yes, Trump Is Scary, but Don't Lose Faith in Progress ”), but Feyerabend’s ferocious critiques of “progress” seem more apt than ever. See for example this four-part riff by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci on Feyerabend’s “defense of astrology.” I interviewed Feyerabend in 1992, and profiled him-as well as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn-in my 1996 book The End of Science. Maybe that’s why the name of this philosophical trouble-maker has been popping up so much lately. The weirder things get, the more relevant Paul Feyerabend becomes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |