Feyerabend’s Formative Years. Volume 2. Feyerabend on Logical Empiricism, Bohm & Kuhn Correspondence and Unpublished Papers

 This book offers an entirely unique approach to the philosopher Paul Feyerabend. Informative, challenging and profound, it immerses the reader deeply in the mind of a truly revolutionary philosopher of science.Anyone who knows similar discussions, like the paradigm shift of Thomas Kuhn, or has a passion for history, philosophy and science will be fascinated by the works of Paul Feyerabend. As scientists and followers of Feyerabend, Collodel and Oberheim strive to pay respect to the philosopher and to make his work accessible to a whole new generation.

1. Introduction.- Part I. Feyerabend and Logical Empiricsm.- 2. “The Dogmas of Logical Empiricism” (1951).- 3. The Feyerabend-Carnap Controversies (1954-1958).- 4. Feyerabend at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (1957-1963).- 5. The Feyerabend-Hempel Correspondence (1961-1977).- 6. Excerpts from the Feyerabend-Smart Correspondence (1963).- Part II. Feyerabend and Bohm.- 7. Autobiographical Remarks (1993).- 8. “On Certain Epistemological and Cosmological Problems Raised in Dr. Feyerabend’s Review of Causality and chance in Modern Physics” (1959).- Part III. Feyerabend and Kuhn.- 9. The Feyerabend Kuhn Correspondence (1960-1961).

Matteo Collodel earned his PhD in Philosophy from the “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice (Italy), with the philosophy of science as his main area of specialization and a historically-oriented dissertation on Paul Feyerabend’s idea of incommensurability (2007). Since 2009, he is qualified as a secondary school teacher in philosophy, history, psychology and the social sciences. He has also worked as a research fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2008-2012) on an archival project funded by the German Research Foundation, whose main aim was to collect, transcribe and edit Feyerabend’s correspondence with Popper, Feigl, Carnap, Hempel, Kuhn, Watkins, Agassi, and Lakatos, among others. Over the last decade, he has given academic lectures and seminars on the philosophy of science and the philosophy of medicine and he has regularly contributed to major international conferences with historical studies on Feyerabend, Carnap, the “Vienna Circle”, Logical Empiricism, and the “Popperian School”, becoming gradually increasingly interested in the sociology of philosophical knowledge and, more generally, in intellectual history. He is currently working on a biography of Paul K. Feyerabend.

Eric Oberheim, author of Feyerabend’s Philosophy (2006), is an internationally renowned Feyerabend scholar who has edited Feyerabend’s posthumously published The Tyranny of Science (2011) and Feyerabend’s The Philosophy of Nature (2016). He is currently working on his Habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as the completion of editing a series of volumes of Feyerabend’s correspondence.