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Events and developments, such as ... the Copernican Revolution, ... occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound by certain obvious methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.

Paul Feyerabend

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Paul Feyerabend
Age: 70 †
Born: 1924
Born: January 13
Died: 1994
Died: February 11
Philosopher
University Teacher
Vienna
Austria
P. K. Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend
Either
Bounds
Copernican
Science
Broke
Methodological
Certain
Obvious
Unwittingly
Rules
Developments
Decided
Thinkers
Revolution
Occurred
Development
Thinker
Events
Bound

More quotes by Paul Feyerabend

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In a war a totalitarian state has a free hand.
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Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.
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Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.
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Given any rule, however �fundamental� or �necessary� for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.
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It is often assumed that science starts from facts and eschews counter-factual theories. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is one of the basic assumptions of the scientific world-view? That the variety of events that surrounds us is held together by a deeper unity.
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Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it.
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Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.
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Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.
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All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
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Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
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What is surprising is that almost all the trends that developed within the sciences, Aristotelianism and an extreme Platonism included, produced results, not only in special domains, but everywhere there exist highly theoretical branches of biology and highly empirical parts of astrophysics. The world is a complex an many-sided thing.
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Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.
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So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.
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Rationalism... is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God.
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I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.
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Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.
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My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.
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A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it.
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A Universal Good should reflect the reality of the individual benefits that are collected under its name, not the other way around.
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One knows quite well that harmony can be a harmony of appearances.
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