Finishing Feyerabend's Formative Years: Volumes 2 and 3

• Applicant: Dr. Eric Oberheim
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469306169

Following the publication of Feyerabend’s Formative Years. Volume 1. Feyerabend and Popper (Springer, 2019), the aim of this project is to complete the Feyerabend’s Formative Years collection with two additional monographs: Volume 2. Feyerabend, Logical Empiricism, Bohm and Kuhn and Volume 3. Feyerabend and the Popperian School.Volume 2 collects Paul Feyerabend’s early unpublished papers and correspondences with and about opponents to Popper’s critical rationalism, such as Rudolf Carnap and logical empiricists, as well as David Bohm and Thomas Kuhn. It contains in-depth , often multi-party, discussions that vary across a variety of intriguing topics, from analytic philosophy and logical empiricism to interpretations of Quantum mechanics and Kuhn’s historical approach. On the whole, these documents are structured chronologically, and begin with Feyerabend’s transition from a student to a professional and cover his early intellectual development, through to his influential 1960s ideas about scientific revolutions and incommensurable theories and the Kuhnian ‘historical turn’ in philosophy of science.Volume 3 collects Feyerabend’s correspondence with three prominent members of Karl Popper’s critical rationalist school: Joseph Agassi (1954-1985), John Watkins (1960-1987) and Imre Lakatos (1864-1967); together with a 1960 draft of what became Feyerabend’s most important paper “Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism” (1962). The discussions reveal Feyerabend’s complex and fluid relation to fellow former students and proponents of Popper’s philosophy, while shedding light on a wide range of contentious issues. Introductions to both volumes will situate the diverse material in context and highlight the main issues under discussion, and an extensive editorial apparatus will provide a wealth of background information about the ideas, events, institutions, literature and people discussed. While the primary material for both volumes has already been collected and arranged (with two exceptions) and was already submitted with the final report for OB 331/2-2, substantial editorial work is still required before the two books are finished, as specified in that report and in much more detail in section 2.3 WORK PROGRAMME below. Upon completion, both additional books will be published in Springer’s Vienna Circle Institute Library series edited by Friedrich Stadler (Vienna).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants