Free Science in a Free Society: Celebrating Feyerabend’s Centennial

Free Science in a Free Society:
Celebrating Feyerabend’s Centennial

With Vandana Shiva and Àlex Gómez-Marín

Tuesday July 23, 2024
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST

This event is LIVE and FREE. All registered participants will receive the RECORDING.

The Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) has been regarded as “the worst enemy of science” (Nature, 1987) but also a “breath of fresh air” (Science, 1979). He is the fourth iteration of the great philosophers of science of the 20th century, after Karl Popper (1902-1994), Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), and Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), standing as one of the most relevant thinkers ever in our understanding of what science really is and does. 

His works —Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), and Farewell to Reason (1987), amongst other books, lectures, and essays— revealed that the so-called scientific method is not so well defined and stable as commonly thought or proclaimed, but crowded with notable anomalies. In fact, the history of science shows that progress often takes place when scientists actually break (rather than follow) the methodological rules and standards we so much venerate. 

He also denounced that science is too often entangled with politics while pretending it isn’t, which enables its misuse for ideological and authoritarian reasons. He deliberately promulgated his famous motto “anything goes” in order to point to another kind of rationality (which some disdain as irrationalism), beyond the dogmatic mechanistic deductive order that seeks to dominate nature and people. Cartesian-Baconian rationality is one (but not the only) valuable tradition in science. One must address the relation between Reason and Practice.

In order to celebrate the centennial of his birth (and three decades since he passed away), Vandana and Alex will be in dialogue for about one hour, reflecting on Feyerabend’s legacy and its impact today. They will discuss current pernicious monotheisms of the mind and, based on general principles and concrete examples, entertain and illustrate alternatives in physics, neurobiology, agriculture, and economy. We would then open it up for questions and comments from the audience.

Science needs boundaries indeed, but they need to be porous. The role of scientists (and the authority of experts) in a genuine democratic society is at stake. The complex dynamics between truth, post-truth, and totalitarianism needs to be put on the table. The tension between dogmatism and anarchism can be resolved via an ecological pluralism applied to our minds and lives.

Dr Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, activist, and author. A food sovereignty advocate, environmentalist, and ecofeminist, Shiva holds a PhD in physics and has written more than 20 books, including Making Peace with the Earth, Staying Alive, Monocultures of the Mind, Democratizing Biology, Soil Not Oil, and Stolen Harvest. Based in Delhi, she is referred to as “Gandhi of grain” for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement. Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the anti-globalization movement. She has worked as a consultant for the Indian government and abroad, and in NGOs such as the International Forum on Globalization, Women’s Environment & Development Organization and Third World Network. She is a co-founder of the gender unit of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, and of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization. Shiva has received numerous international honors, such as the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace (2008), Sydney’s Peace Prize (2010), Calgary’s Peace Prize (2011), and the Right Livelihood Award (1993), which is regarded as the “alternative Nobel Prize”.

Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time to the neurobiology of action-perception across species, from flies and worms to mice and humans. Since 2016 he has been the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining computational biology and continental philosophy, his current research concentrates on consciousness in the real world.