I suggest following Paul Feyerabend's own advice, and interpreting Feyerabend's work in light of the principles laid out by John Stuart Mill. A review of Mill's essay, On Liberty, emphasizes the importance Mill placed on open and critical discussion for the vitality and progress of various aspects of human life, including the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Many of Feyerabend's more unusual stances, I suggest, are best interpreted as attempts to play certain roles--especially the role of "defender of unpopular minority opinion"--that (...) are necessary to fulfilling Mill's conditions for rational exchange and optimal human development. (shrink)

Between the appearance of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus in 1543 and the works of Kepler and Galileo that appeared in 1609–10, there were probably no more than a dozen converts to physical heliocentrism. Following Westman we take this list to include Rheticus, Maestlin, Rothmann, Kepler, Bruno, Galileo, Digges, Harriot, de Zúńiga, and Stevin, but we include Gemma Frisius and William Gilbert, and omit Thomas Harriot. In this paper we discuss the reasons this tiny group of true Copernicans give for believing that (...) Copernicus, not Ptolemy or Tycho Brahe, was correct. We conclude that the early followers of Copernicus can be divided into two main groups, designated mathematicians and physicists. Two main arguments appear in the works of the former: first, the relationship between the velocity of a planet and its distance from the center of the world; second, the explanation of retrogradations. Early Copernicans differed on the reality of celestial spheres, and several attempted to reconcile heliocentrism with scripture. The mathematicians continued to accept a traditional definition of the scope of astronomy and the methods of science, both issues challenged by Kepler and Galileo. Hence the work of Copernicus set in motion a train of events that led to a decisive epistemological shift, but did not itself represent such a shift. The real revolution is the replacement of the methods and goals of Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics with Copernicanism in its modern form, which incorporates the conceptual structure of Kepler and the astronomical evidence of Galileo. (shrink)

“There could be no fairer destiny for any. . . theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on, as a limiting case.” ALBERT EINSTEIN..