John Preston

University of Reading · Department of Philosophy

This paper is not a full comparison of the philosophies of Mach and Feyerabend, nor a defence of modern readings of Mach, such as Feyerabend’s, against the received view of Mach as a pre-logical positivist. What is attempted here is an account and critical evaluation of the most significant things Feyerabend said about Mach. I first trace the ways...

The received view is that Ernst Mach should not be counted as among the important influences on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought. Recently, though, some affinities between their works have been brought to light, and two scholars, Henk Visser and Jaakko Hintikka, have gone beyond this to claim that Wittgenstein took specific and important...

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Of all the influences on the work of Paul Feyerabend, Ernst Mach’s was probably the most long-standing, and undoubtedly among the most important. I first show that Feyerabend’s earliest mentions of Mach are heavily under the influence of Karl Popper. Early Feyerabend characterises Mach in traditional terms as a positivist whose philosophy is flawed...

Identifications, diagnoses, and treatments of pseudo-problems form a family of classic methodologies in later nineteenth century philosophy and at least partly, I shall argue, in the philosophy of science. They were devised, not by academic philosophers, but by three of the greatest philosopher-scientists. Here I show how Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz...

This volume presents new essays on the work and thought of physicist, psychologist, and philosopher Ernst Mach. Moving away from previous estimations of Mach as a pre-logical positivist, the essays reflect his rehabilitation as a thinker of direct relevance to debates in the contemporary philosophies of natural science, psychology, metaphysics, and...

This volume presents new essays on the work and thought of physicist, psychologist, and philosopher Ernst Mach. Moving away from previous estimations of Mach as a pre-logical positivist, the essays reflect his rehabilitation as a thinker of direct relevance to debates in the contemporary philosophies of natural science, psychology, metaphysics, and...

Interpreting Mach – Critical Essays, is a new collection of essays on Ernst Mach, edited by John Preston (University of Reading, UK). This volume presents the latest in-depth research on Mach’s work and thought. Moving decisively away from previous estimations of Mach as a pre-logical positivist, the papers pursue his rehabilitation as a thinker of...

Identifications, diagnoses, and treatments of pseudo-problems form a family of classic methodologies in later nineteenth century philosophy and at least partly, as I shall argue, in the philosophy of science. They were devised, not by academic philosophers, but by three of the greatest of the philosopher-scientists. (Later, the idea was taken up by...

Recent years have seen something of a resurgence of anti-realist views in the philosophy of science, with a wide variety of kinds of anti‐realism now on offer. After producing books on Karl Popper’s critical rationalism (2011) and on probability (2015), Darrell Rowbottom has turned his attention to the realism/anti-realism debate, his new book aimi...

This paper attempts to show how Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science was influenced by the work of Michael Polanyi. It argues, firstly, that Feyerabend’s early work was dominated by the influence of Kraft and Popper, as well as by Feyerabend’s reading of Wittgenstein. The strongly normative approach to epistemology instilled by Kraft and Popper...

Paul Feyerabend’s work ranged over many of the most exciting questions in twentieth-century philosophy: the nature of meaning and of observation; the relationship between scientific theory and experience; the difference between science and myth; the anatomy of conceptual change; the materialist picture of human beings; the status of common sense; t...

In the first chapter of his book Logical Foundations of Probability, Rudolf Carnap introduced and endorsed a philosophical methodology which he called the method of ‘explication’. P.F. Strawson took issue with this methodology, but it is currently undergoing a revival. In a series of articles, Patrick Maher has recently argued that explication is a...

Paul K. Feyerabend (1924–94) was an imaginative maverick philosopher of science, a critic of positivism, as well as, more recently, falsificationism, philosophy of science itself, and of “rationalist” attempts to lay down or discover rules of scientific method.

Many commentators agree that Wittgenstein took the idea that propositions are Bilder, or at least the terminology of Bilder, from Heinrich Hertz, or from Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann, the great Viennese theoretical physicist, was the founder of statistical thermodynamics, the modern theory of heat. The context within which Hertz and Boltzm...

I summarize certain aspects of Paul Feyerabend's account of the development of Western rationalism, show the ways in which that account is supposed to run up against an alternative, that of Karl Popper, and then try to give a preliminary comparison of the two. My interest is primarily in whether what Feyerabend called his 'story' constitutes a poss...

Archaeological theory is a fluid and fractured field that is an arena of lively debate. This Handbook will guide students and practitioners through this field in a novel way, connecting ideas in different schools of thought through the key problems upon which they focus. Major themes are tackled in review papers by experts in those areas, while the...

It has been urged repeatedly over the last two decades that empirical findings in neuroscience and psychology provide compelling reasons for endorsing a representative theory of perception. Richard L. Gregory and John R. Smythies are perhaps the best-known advocates of this view. When it comes to vision, in particular, scientists of this persuasion...

Paul Feyerabend (b. 1924–d. 1994), whose productive career lasted forty-five years, wrote on a plethora of philosophical issues, although much of his work concerned the nature and role of science. He was no narrowly trained or narrowly focused academic, though. His time as a student was divided among the studies of singing, stage management, theate...

Many of us now imagine that in the future humans either will, or at least could, ‘in theory’, construct an electronic digital computer which would really be a thinking thing. Alan Turing was one of the first and surely the most notable exponent of this view, and a significant proportion of his published work was devoted to arguing for it.

This chapter poses a challenge to the extended mind thesis that Andy Clark and David Chalmers propose for beliefs, upon which their thesis is largely based. Clark and Chalmers present two related theses in their exposition of the extended mind. First they present “active externalism,” which states that a cognitive system is achieved when humans are...

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Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? In their famous 1998 paper "The Extended Mind," philosophers Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers posed this question and answered it provocatively...

This volume discusses Wittgenstein's work, as well as his oeuvre in general, and its implications for the nature of reason. Investigates the nature of reason which has always been a topic at the very heart of Western philosophy. Analyses how Wittgenstein raised crucial questions about the subject - most notably in his critique of Frazer's Golden Bo...

The place of Heinrich Hertz’s The principles of mechanics in the history of the philosophy of science is disputed. Here I critically assess positivist interpretations, concluding that they are inadequate.There is a group of commentators who seek to align Hertz with positivism, or with specific positivists such as Ernst Mach, who were enormously inf...

There have recently appeared claims that the influence Heinrich Hertz exerted over Wittgenstein's later work was far more abiding than previously recognised. I critically evaluate such claims by Gordon Baker and Allan Janik. I first show that Hertz was indeed concerned with the same feature, clarity, which often exercised Wittgenstein. But I then a...

A critical notice of Donald Gillies' book Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century: Four Central Themes (Wiley-Blackwell).

Various claims have been made about the influence of Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics on Wittgenstein's work. I consider some such recent claims, made by Allan Janik, to the effect that Hertz exercised a very strong influence on Wittgenstein, early and late. I suggest they are ill-founded, in virtue of misinterpretations either of Hertz, or...

I challenge Alexander Bird’s contention that the divergence between Kuhn’s views and recent philosophy of science is a matter of Kuhn having taken a wrong turn. Bird is right to remind us of Kuhn’s naturalistic tendencies, but these are not clearly an asset, rather than a liability. Kuhn was right to steer clear of extreme referential conceptions o...

Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being By Paul Feyerabend, edited by Bert Terpstra University of Chicago Press, 2000, xviii + 285pp - - Volume 75 Issue 4 - John Preston

This stimulating collection is devoted to the life and work of the most flamboyant of twentieth-century philosophers, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend's radical epistemological claims, and his stunning argument that there is no such thing as scientific method, were highly influential during his life and have only gained attention since his death in 1994...

This stimulating collection is devoted to the life and work of the most flamboyant of twentieth-century philosophers, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend's radical epistemological claims, and his stunning argument that there is no such thing as scientific method, were highly influential during his life and have only gained attention since his death in 1994...

This paper aims to clarify both Paul Feyerabend’s last work and the nature of the post-modern by situating that work relative to three different positions in the philosophy of science which have been called ‘post-modern’. These are (1) John Dupré’s extended case for the disunity of science, (2) the Lyotardian view that our intellectual world is fra...

The relationship between thought and language has been of central importance to philosophy ever since Plato characterised thinking as 'a dialogue the soul has with itself'. In this volume, several major twentieth-century philosophers of mind and language make further contributions to the debate. Among the questions addressed are: is language concep...

In attempting to assess the legacy of Paul Feyerabend's philosophical work, matters are complicated by the fact that there was a change in his basic orientation towards the philosophy of science around the end of the 1960s. Here I shall indicate one aspect of Feyerabend's divided legacy. My main aims are to sketch the principal themes in his (fairl...

Western philosophy has a long-standing interest in the relationship between thought and language. This is not least because language use and our mental capacities are so central to our human self-conception, as well as to the ways in which we have tried to think about other beings. Retrospectively, it is possible to identify certain broad tradition...

Popper's philosophy is founded on his early conceptions of the problem of demarcation, of its solution, and of the roles of epistemology and methodology. I shall give an account of these, and of his idea of the alternative, ‘naturalistic’ conceptions. I then hope to show that Popper's conceptions are confused. At the beginning of The Logic of Scien...

Andy Clark and David Chalmer's theses of 'active externalism' and 'the extended mind' ('The Extended Mind', Analysis, 58, 1998) claim that (a) when humans are appropriately linked with 'external' entities, the whole arrangement constitutes a cognitive system in its own right, and (b) some of a subject's mental phenomena are constituted partly by fe...