Interpreting Feyerabend Critical Essays

This collection of new essays interprets and critically evaluates the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend's take on topics such as realism, empiricism, mimesis, voluntarism, pluralism, materialism, and the mind-body problem, as well as certain debates in the philosophy of physics. It also considers the ways in which Feyerabend's thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy, including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, citizen science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. The volume will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics which Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought.

Introduction. Paul Feyerabend's Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century Jamie Shaw and Karim Bschir; 1. Feyerabend on Art and Science Chiara Ambrosio; 2. The Coherence of Feyerabend's Pluralist Realism Hasok Chang; 3. Feyerabend's General Theory of Scientific Change Hakob Barseghyan; 4. Feyerabend's Theoretical Pluralism: An Investigation of the Epistemic Value of False Theories K. Brad Wray; 5. Epistemological Anarchism Meets Epistemic Voluntarism: Feyerabend's Against Method and van Fraassen's The Empirical Stance Martin Kusch; 6. Feyerabend Never was an Eliminative Materialist: Feyerabend's Meta-Philosophy and the Mind-Body Problem Jamie Shaw; 7. Feyerabend's Reevaluation of Scientific Practice: Quantum Mechanics, Realism and Niels Bohr Daniel Kuby; 8. On Feyerabend, General Relativity, and 'Unreasonable' Universes J. B. Manchak; 9. Feyerabend, Science, and Scientism Ian James Kidd; 10. Matthew Brown – Against Expertise: A Lesson from Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society? Matthew Brown; 11. A Way Forward for Citizen Science: Taking Advice from a Madman Sarah M. Roe.

Karim Bschir is a Lecturer at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. His research focuses on topics in the general philosophy of science and the history of philosophy of science. He has written on the relationship of Feyerabend's pluralism to Popper's critical rationalism.
Jamie Shaw is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He has written numerous papers on Feyerabend's thought and its place in twentieth-century philosophy of science, and on the relevance of his pluralism to contemporary debates on climate change and the freedom of science.