Tyranny of Science

The Tyranny of Science by Paul Feyerabend, 134 pages

The Tyranny of Science is an adaptation of a series of lectures delivered by Feyerabend, themselves the distillations of decades of class lectures and extracurricular talks.  These form a critique of what Feyerabend sees as the unjustified hegemonic dominance of Scientism in Western culture.  Far from conceding that a scientific worldview justifies itself by its successes, he questions the very concepts of success and progress.  More fundamentally, he insists that reality exists prior to theory, and valid interpretations of that reality include not only the mathematical but also the poetic, not only the universal but also the particular, not only the abstract but also the concrete.   He drives home this analysis through an extensive use of Plato, the pre-Socratics, and the Greek dramatists, less as a source for arguments than as a source of illustrations for his arguments.

Each chapter closes with the transcript of a question and answer session, and it is obvious that Feyerabend takes great pleasure in the give and take.  The author's playfulness certainly makes the text more lively, but it also seems to be the author's primary motivation.  Feyerabend does not attack Scientism because he disdains science, but because he rejects any claim to final, incontrovertible Truth.  For Feyerabend, absolute Truth is an unintelligible concept, and philosophy is found in the interplay of truths.  Clearly, he finds dancing on the edge of the abyss of nihilism exhilarating, but to an outside observer it also appears unsustainable.