Dr. Matteo Collodel
September 1st, 2024 until February 28th, 2025
Affiliation: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Research for a study about:
Between Logical Empiricism and Critical Rationalism:
Feyerabend’s Philosophical Breakthrough
Feyerabend’s evolving thought can arguably be accounted for as a combination of two factors: (i) his anti-authoritarian stance, understood in light of his upbringing in a totalitarian regime and of the permanent wounds that Feyerabend’s war experience in the Nazi army left on his body and soul; (ii) the dialectical response to intellectual stimuli within Socratic settings characterized by intense personal interaction, such as para-academic institutions in postwar Vienna; the nascent Popperian School at the LSE in the 1950s; the philosophy of science institutes which flourished in the US in the early 1960s on the model of Herbert Feigl’s Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science and, ultimately, of the Vienna Circle; and the confrontational gatherings and argumentative climate fostered by the student movement in the late 1960s.
The main aim of my research fellowship project is to finalize two papers which provide a detailed reconstruction of the genesis and evolution of Feyerabend’s position throughout the 1960s and an assessment of its soundness, focusing on Feyerabend's reception of logical empiricism since his university studies in Vienna between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, his interaction with the most prominent representatives of logical empiricism in North America, and the impact of Feyerabend’s theoretical pluralism on the demise of logical empiricism in the later 1960s, with special reference to the Feyerabend-Hempel connection. A secondary aim of my fellowship project is to start developing a monograph that would offer a fine-grained and comprehensive reconstruction of Feyerabend’s intellectual development from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, focusing on the “skeptical phase” (1965-69) which brought him from the normative methodological approach of his theoretical pluralism to the anti-methodological approach that characterized his epistemological anarchism and inspired Feyerabend’s utopian vision of a “Free Society”.
Lecture
Criticism, Misrepresentation, and Decline: Feyerabend and Logical Empiricism
Philosophy of Science Colloquium Talk
Logik Café Lecture
Date: November 21, 2024
Time: 4.45-6.15 pm
Venue: Lecture Hall 2G, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 2nd floor, 1090 Vienna
Abstract
Feyerabend became familiar with the Vienna Circle tradition and Logical Empiricism in his formative years in post-war Vienna. However, since his early intellectual trajectory, he made LE one of his favorite critical targets, articulating his criticism in personal dialogue with some of its most distinguished representatives. This paper focuses on the second stage of Feyerabend’s sustained assault against LE, examining both Feyerabend’s reception of LE and Hempel’s response to Feyerabend’s challenge.
In a series of papers published between 1962 and 1966, Feyerabend relentlessly questioned the descriptive adequacy and the normative desirability of the ‘orthodox’, logical empiricist, accounts of reduction and explanation advanced by Hempel and Nagel. Feyerabend’s persistent criticism shook North American philosophy of science and prompted Hempel’s reaction, which appeared in print in the second half of the 1960s. Initially, Hempel retorted that Feyerabend’s methodological analysis was ‘completely mistaken’ and Feyerabend could offer ‘no support’ for his allegations. This raises interesting historiographical questions about the later reception of LE as it seems that Feyerabend, driven by his anti-authoritarian stance, substantially misinterpreted the logical empiricist research programme, his vantage point notwithstanding. On the other hand, Hempel also recognised that the descriptive issues on which Feyerabend insisted, despite having been long acknowledged by LE, could have more far-reaching consequences than previously envisaged. In fact, by the end of the 1960s, Hempel came to make quite radical concessions, admitting that the standard logical empiricist model for explicating the structure of scientific theories was essentially ‘misleading’, that the logical empiricist account of reduction was ‘an untenable oversimplification’, and that the logical empiricist approach as to the meaning of scientific terms was actually ‘misconceived’. In this respect, there are good reasons to consider the decline of the logical empiricist research programme in the 1970s at least partly as the result of Feyerabend’s stimulating, however misrepresenting, insights.