Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 09:46:38 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: Re: PKF: new to list


On Thu, 6 Apr 1995, GREG RANSOM wrote:

> One question I have right off the bat is about Feyerabend's
> participation in Hayek Alp conference in 1966, titled the
> Analogy Symposium.  Hayek sponsored this symposium between
> Aapril 17-24, 1966 in Bellagio, Italy.  If anyone can tell
> me what Feyerabend was working on in the 1965-1966 period,
> or what paper he might have presented at this conference I
> would find this of great interest. 

This must once again be something I have never even heard about - so thank
you for mentioning it, Greg, and I hope there'll be someone among us who
knows more about those particular proceedings. Now, what follows will
undoubtedly look like the stream of consciousness it is... %-) (24 hours
in a row, eyes are beginning to show slight signs of disapproval :-)

There were those Saltzburg proceedings about the same time, one of them
containg a paper on many-valued logics and the latter ('67 or '68) being
an early version of the Galileo case studies that became the heart of
AM. Then there is the paper that appeared in _Club Voltaire_ III (about
'67, title escapes me, something to do with the cold war) - and about that
time the talk that became "On the Improvement of the Arts and the Sciences
etc." (_Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science_ III, '67) was given
at the Boston Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science (the talk was even
published separately, due to Joseph Agassi who at that time edited the
journal it was published in). Then there was a little paper defending 
pluralism in the proceedings of a rather untypical American colloquium 
for PKF to have presented a paper in, published '68. And of course the 
final part of the conferences Lakatos arranged in London was held in '65 
(PKF didn't attend), after which he must have been working on 
"Consolations for the Specialists". And then, AM and "Problems of 
Empiricism, part II" of '70 - some of the material in them had already 
appeared in German in that Salzburg essay, perhaps other places.

Also, if the "Notes on Authors" of the first issue of _Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science_ is anything to go by, Feyerabend was supposed
to publish at least a volume of selected or collected papers by the end of
'70 which then never happened - and the paper "In Defence of Classical
Physics" may have started out as a criticism of what Popper had presented
in one of those '65 conferences arranged by Lakatos. And then, since the
improved Italian version of "Problems of Empiricism" was published in '71,
he could have been working on it towards the end of 60s. And then, the 
colloquium where the original versions of the talks and discussions meant 
for _Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science_ must have been 
around '67 or '68 - the paper PKF presented there and the discussions 
(the latter published in MSPS IV) are supposed to have been quite 
different from the early half of AM that ended up published. From some 
of his own references it seemed like a rather comprehensive paper on 
philosophy of microphysics was going to end up in MSPS IV, so perhaps he 
was working on that among other things before working on what became AM 
went over that.

> A second general inquiry would be about Feyerabend's role in
> the development of eliminitive materialism.  One curious thing
> here is Feyerabend's connection to Quine and Rorty on this.

I've gotten the impression that those papers in defence of materialism
were somewhat annoyed reactions to some stuff that people like Norman
Malcolm published (in criticism of J.J.C. Smart etc.) - at least they fit
against each other nicely. And then, he had Herbert Feigl to argue with
about the methodology of developing materialistic theories of mind/brain. 
There is a collection of papers from about '70 that has papers by PKF,
Smart, Malcolm, Feigl, Quine, Rorty, etc., which should work well in
comparisons. Feyerabend doesn't mention Quine too often, Rorty does
mention Feyerabend but maybe takes different routes - perhaps the
Churchlands, e.g. Paul M. Churchland in _Scientific Realism and the
Plasticity of Mind_ followed most closely on the routes PKF (re)opened. 

As usual, I start babbling when I'm tired enough - or is it because ot 
the sun? :-)

Well, what does everybody else think about the themes Greg brought up?


Sunny greetings - you can bet that the Sun will feature prominently in 
everything I say from here 'till September since I don't have the Sun all 
year like some of you - 

Marko
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Marko Toivanen * * * * * *         * * * *  co-moderator in FEYERABEND of
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http://www.joensuu.fi/~mtoivane/ * finger mtoivane-AT-cc.joensuu.fi for info

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