Feyerabend, Truth, and Relativisms: Footnotes to the Italian Debate

There is a substantial literature on Feyerabend’s relativismdincluding a few papers in this collection, but fewer specific studies of the ways that his writings and ideas have been taken up among the non-academic public. This is odd, given his obvious interest in the lives and concerns of persons who were not ‘intellectuals’da term that, for him, had a pejorative ring to it. It is also odd, given the abundance of evidence of how Feyerabend’s relativism played a role in a specific national and cultural contextdnamely, contemporary Italian debates about relativism. This paper offers a study of how Feyerabend’s ideas have been deployed by Italian intellectuals and cultural commentatorsdincluding the current Popedand critically assesses them.