Feyerabend and Galileo

In Against Method (1975), Feyerabend’s main argument for epistemological anarchism is drawn from a long case-study of Galileo’s defence of the heliocentric cosmology. Feyerabend shows that Galileo broke all sorts of methodological rules to argue for the Copernican hypothesis against the received Aristotelian view, often introducing (or pushing) new interpretations whenever empirical evidence seemed to be unmistakably in contrast with the earth’s rotation. Given the widely-accepted understanding of Galileo as the “father of modern science” and one of the “heroes” of the Scientific Revolution, upholding freedom of research against any dogmatism, Feyerabend claims that, if the Copernican worldview is currently accepted, it is not because it is in agreement with reason, but, rather, because “reason was overruled at some time in their past”. Feyerabend’s challenging portrayal of Galileo (in Against Method and elsewhere, including Farewell to Reason and “Problems of Empiricism”) is not supposed to be an attack on Galileo, or on science, though, but aims at offering a critique of the views of contemporary philosophers of science (chiefly Popper and Kuhn), who made Galileo a hero of method and rationality. Rather than a historical reconstruction of the Galileo case, Feyerabend aims, on the one hand, to show the intrinsic limits of any rational reconstructions of a historical event; and, on the other, to call attention to the all too frequent risk of turning science into dogma, thereby neutralizing it.