The authors Matteo Collodel and Eric Oberheim take the reader on a journey through the early life of the famous Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend, whose groundbreaking work Against the Method forged new paths in the philosophical understanding of science.
Collodel and Oberheim's book contains the translated correspondence of Feyerabend (1924-1994) with equally influential philosophers and scientists of the time, including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Carl G. Hempel, J.J.C. Smart, David Bohm, and Thomas Kuhn.
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.
The main focus lies on the explanation of Paul Feyerabend's ideas on logical empiricism and quantum mechanics, which he developed especially in the 1960s. In order to appreciate the celebrated work of the philosopher, it is important to create an understanding of these formative years in Feyerabend's life and work.
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.
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.
