The Coherence of Feyerabend’s Pluralist Realism


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Book chapter
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that Feyerabend cultivated a pluralist realism in a sustained way over his long academic career. The coherence of his evolving position is often ignored due to the common prejudice that pluralism cannot be compatible with realism, leading to the assumption that Feyerabend must have discarded realism as he became more flamboyantly pluralist in his later years. Rather than abandoning the realism that he advocated in the early years, he made it stronger by articulating a metaphysical layer of pluralist realism to add to the longstanding epistemological layer. The later development also resolved some tensions in his earlier views, which were interestingly revealed in his mid-career attempt to distinguish different meanings of “realism”.

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Keywords
50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields
Is Part Of
Interpreting Feyerabend
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British Academy (WP160055)