In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that one's favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from (...) an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant. (shrink)

Papers produced for a conference of economists, economic methodologists and historians of economics, convened to reflect on the question of whether MSRP - the methodology of scientific research programmes - has proved useful in the light of 20 years' experience.

The sociological dimension of science is studied using the discovery of the Wasserman reaction and its accidental application as a test for syphilis as a basis, ...

Introduction i. Adam Smith's Lectures at Glasgow University Adam Smith was elected to the Chair of Logic at Glasgow University on 9 January, and admitted to ...