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Sola Experientia?—Feyerabend's Refutation of Classical Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Bas C. van Fraassen
Bas C. van Fraassen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
*
†Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton N.J. 08544 USA; e-mail [email protected].
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Extract

Feyerabend's “Classical Empiricism” (1970) draws on a 17th century Jesuit argument against Protestant fundamentalism. The argument is very general, and applies to any simple foundationalist epistemology. Feyerabend uses it against Classical Empiricism—roughly, the view that what is to be believed is exactly what experience establishes, and no more—which he identifies as among other things Newton's “dogmatic ideology.”

Type
Symposium: Paul Feyerabend and His Legacy
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 64 , Issue S4: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1996 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Dec., 1997 , 1997 , pp. S385 - S395
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1997

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Footnotes

‡

The author wishes to thank Elisabeth Lloyd, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Plantinga for helpful discussions.

References

Feyerabend, P. K. (1970), “Classical empiricism”, in R. E. Butts and J. W. Davis, The Methodological Heritage of Newton. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 150–166. Reprinted in P. K. Feyerabend (1981), Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 34–51.10.3138/9781442632783-009CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popkin, R. H. (1979), The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520342453CrossRefGoogle Scholar