Abstract
John Preston has contended that Paul Feyerabend retreated from his earlier commitment to realism and consciously embraced a ‘voluntarist’, social constructionist, idealism. Though there seems to be unmistakable subjective idealist statements in some of Feyerabend's writings, it will be argued that Feyerabend's idealistic period was short-lived, and that he returned to a form of realism in his later writings. Specifically, Feyerabend's distinction between theoretical/abstract and empirical/historical traditions of thought, when understood with Feyerabend's re evaluation of Bohr's philosophy of quantum physics in mind, is most aptly interpreted as aprocess realist position. Preston, in interpreting Feyerabend as a voluntarist, social constructionist, subjective idealist, fails to distinguish the ever-present rhetorical and provocative statements of Feyerabend's from the core arguments being presented.
REFERENCES
Bohr, N.: 1937, ‘Causality and Complementarity', Philosophy of Science 4, 289-298.
Bohr, N.: 1958, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Feyerabend, P.K.: 1968-69, ‘On a Recent Critique of Complementarity: Parts I and II', Philosophy of Science 35-6, 309-31, and 82-105.
Feyerabend, P.K.: 1978, Science in a Free Society, NLB, London.
Feyerabend, P.K.: 1981a, ‘Introduction', Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, vi-xii.
Feyerabend, P.K.: 1981b, ‘Historical Background: Some Observations on the Decay of the Philosophy of Science', Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1-33.
Feyerabend, P. K.: 1987, Farewell to Reason, Verso, London.
Feyerabend, P. K.: 1989, ‘Realism and the Historicity of Knowledge', Journal of Philosophy 86, 393-406.
Folse, H.: 1985, The Philosophy of Niels Bohr: The Framework of Complementarity, North Holland Physics Publishing, Amsterdam.
Hacking, I.: 1983, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hooker, C. A.: 1972, ‘The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality: Einstein Versus Bohr', in Colodny, R.G.: (ed), Paradigms and Paradoxes, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 67-302.
Hooker, C.A.: 1974, ‘The Metaphysics of Science: Atoms Versus Plena', International Logic Review 5, 111-46.
Murdoch, D.: 1987, Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Preston, J.: 1997, ‘Feyerabend's Retreat from Realism’, Philosophy of Science 64, 421-31.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Farell, R.P. Feyerabend's Metaphysics: Process-Realism, or Voluntarist-Idealism?. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 32, 351–369 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013181717858
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013181717858