3 ms·

I’m currently reading Paul Feyerabend’s “Farewell to Reason”, which makes a lot of the same arguments, but in a more philosophical and less political way. Highl

• swatcoder 4y ago
  Feyerabend was a brilliant renegade philosopher of science and articulated a lot of strong claims about the emperor’s clothes. But like Thomas Szasz in his role as renegade philosopher of mental health, as Feyerabend’s career continued his writing became increasingly caught up in antagonizing the peers who cast him out as a pariah and outcast. Between trying to make a push against the mainstream assumptions in their fields, and getting increasingly defensive and personal in their writing, it’s very easy to miss the core arguments being made by each and the valid issues they were trying to bring attention to. There comes to be a lot of noise and easy distraction. For anyone who gives either a try, which can be a very intellectually stimulating experience, you need to resist the urge to be superficially dismissive if you want to get anything out of the work at all. If you’re not open to gestalt shifts or parallel perspectives in the way you view the underlying subjects, there’s really no point in spending the time. You’ll just want to rip up the book and throw it at the wall.