Paul Feyerabend citations (81 citations, Page 2)

Paul Feyerabend: 81 citations0 J'aime

Paul Feyerabend: Citations en anglais

“Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

pg 151.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“One can show the following: given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Against Method

Pg. 23.
Against Method (1975)

“The attitude of the Church was not as dogmatic as is often assumed. Interpretations of Bible passages had been revised in the light of scientific research before. Everyone regarded the earth as spherical and as freely floating in space though the Bible tells a different story.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

pg 45.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“A Universal Good should reflect the reality of the individual benefits that are collected under its name, not the other way around.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

pg 218.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

“The progress of science, of good science, depends on novel ideas and on intellectual freedom: science has very often been advanced by outsiders (remember that Bohr and Einstein regarded themselves as outsiders).”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

“Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly… But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

“People have different professions, different points of view. They are like observers looking at the world through the narrow windows of an otherwise closed structure. Occasionally they assemble at the center and discuss what they have seen; then one observer will talk about a beautiful landscape with red trees, a red sky, and a red lake in the middle; the next one about an infinite blue plane without articulation; and the third about an impressive, five-floor-high building; they will quarrel. The observer on top of the structure (me) can only laugh at their quarrels-but for them the quarrels will be real and he (the observer on top) will be an unworldly dreamer. Real life… is exactly like that. Every person has his own well-defined opinions, which color the section of the world he percieves. And when people come together, when they try to discover the nature of the whole which they belong, they are bound to talk past each other; they will understand neither themselves nor their companions.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Killing Time

Pg 48.
Killing Time (1995)

“Do electrons exist, or are they merely fictious ideas for the ordering of observations (sense date, classical events)?… If there are only sensations, then terms such as 'election or 'St. Augustine' are auxiliary terms, designed to bring some order into our experiences.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

Science in a Free Society (1978)

“Rational discourse is only one way of presenting and examining an issue and by no means the best. Our new intellectuals are not aware of its limitations and of the nature of the things outside.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

Source: Science in a Free Society (1978), p. 184.

“By now many intellectuals regard theoretical or 'objective' knowledge as the only knowledge worth considering. Popper himself encourages the belief by his slander of relativism. Now this conceit would have substance if scientists and philosophers looking for universal and objective morality had succeeded in finding the former and persuaded, rather than forced, dissenting cultures to adopt the latter. This is not the case.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Farewell to Reason

pg 168.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

“Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Against Method

Source: Against Method (1975), p. 9.

“[Responding to criticism from Dr. Hesse] Voodoo, Dr Hesse's piece de risistance', is case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness and confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even revise, our knowledge of physiology.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Against Method

Pg. 50.
Against Method (1975)

“Now - how can we possibly examine something we use all the time and presuppose in every statement? How can we criticize the terms in which we habitually express our observations? Let us see! The first step in our criticism of commonly-used concepts is to create a measure of criticism, something with which these concepts can be compared. Of course, we shall later want to know a little more about the measuring stick itself; for example, we shall want to know whether it is better than, or perhaps not as good as, the material examined. But in order for this examination to start there must be a measuring-stick in the first place. Therefore, the first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds with the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen. This step is, again, counter-inductive, Counter-induction is thus both a fact”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Against Method

science could not exist without it - and a legitimate and much needed move in the game of science.
Pg 68.
Against Method (1975)

“Mathematical Reasoning is not only exact; it has its own criteria of reality”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

pg 52.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“There is no coherent knowledge, i. e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Farewell to Reason

pg 98, italics are feyerabends.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

“Most scientists today are devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes "scientific progress" in many areas.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

“One knows quite well that harmony can be a harmony of appearances”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

pg 51.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

Source: Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous]), p. 20.

“My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

Who's Who in America (1991)

“And where is the boundary-if there is a boundary-between a collective outlook and "the world"?. Many cultures assume such a boundary, but they set it in different places. Divine appearances once were real- they are mere fantasies today. Where shall we, who examine the phenomenon, set the boundary?”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

pg 27.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

“I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

pg 136.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“Early Chinese thinkers had taken variety at face value. They had favored diversification and collected anomalies instead of trying to explain them away.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

Pg 7.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

“It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity", "truth", it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Against Method

Pg. 27 & 28, italics are Feyerabend's
Against Method (1975)

“We have to realize that a unified theory of the physical world simply does not exist. We have theories that work in restricted regions, we have purely formal attempts to condense them into a single formula, we have lots of unfounded claims (such as the claim that all of chemistry can be reduced to physics), phenomena that do not fit into the accepted framework are suppressed; in physics, which many scientists regard as the one really basic science, we have now at least three different point of view (relativity, dealing with the very large, quantum theory for an intermediate domain and various particle models for the very small) without a promise of conceptual (and not only formal) unification; perceptions are outside of the material universe (the mind-body problem is still unsolved) - from the very beginning the salesman of a universal truth cheated people into admissions instead of clearly arguing for their philosophy. And let us not forget that it was they and not the representatives of the traditions they attacked who introduced argument as the one and only universal arbiter. They praised argument - they constantly violated its principles.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Farewell to Reason

pg 100
Farewell to Reason (1987)

“I want to defend society and its inhabitants from all ideologies, science included. All ideologies must be seen in perspective. One must not take them too seriously. One must read them like fairy-tales which have lots of interesting things to say but which also contain wicked lies, or like ethical prescriptions which may be useful rules of thumb but which are deadly when followed to the letter.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

“What is surprising is that almost all the trends that developed within the sciences, Aristotelianism and an extreme Platonism included, produced results, not only in special domains, but everywhere; there exist highly theoretical branches of biology and highly empirical parts of astrophysics. The world is a complex an many-sided thing.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

Pg 152.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

“Truth', written 'in capital letters', is an orphan in this world, without power and influence… ['Reason'] cannot stand diverging opinions - it calls them 'lies'; it puts itself 'above' the real lives of human beings, demanding, in a way characteristic of all totalitarian ideologies, the right to rebuild the world from the height of 'what it should be', i. e. in accordance with its own 'invincible' precepts. It refuses to recognize the many ideas, actions, feelings, laws, institutions, racial features which separate one nation (culture, civilization) from another… The reason of ordinary people trying to create a better and safer world for themselves and their children (which is reason with a small 'r' and not Reason 'written in capital letters') has very little in common with these ignorant dreams of domination.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Farewell to Reason

pg 102.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

“Experts have a vested interest in their own playpens, and so they will quite naturally argue that 'education' is impossible without them (can you imagine an Oxford philosopher, or an elementary particle physicist arguing himself out of good money?)”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

Science in a Free Society (1978)

“Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on… They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend

pg 28.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

“Experts often arrive at different results, both in fundamental matters, and in application Who does not know of at least one case in his family where one doctor recommends a certain operation, another argues against it, while a third suggests an entirely different procedure? Who has not read of the debates about nuclear safety, the of the economy, the effects of pesticides, aerosol sprays, the efficiency of methods of education, the influence of race on intelligence? Two, three, five and even more views arise in such debates, and scientific supporters can be found for all of them. Occasionally one almost feels inclined to say: as many scientists, as many opinions. There are of course areas in which scientists agree- but this cannot raise our confidence. Unanimity is often the result of a political decision: dissenters are suppressed, or remain silent to preserve the reputation of science as a source of trustworthy and almost infallible knowledge. On other occasions, unanimity is the result of shared prejudices: positions are taken without detail examination of the matter under review and are infused with the same authority that proceeds from detailed research.”

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Paul Karl Feyerabend livre Science in a Free Society

Source: Science in a Free Society (1978), p. 88.

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Paul Feyerabend: Citations en anglais

Paul Feyerabend citations
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