Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The common myth about the Scientific Revolution is that it represented a turn from ungrounded speculation to theory based solidly upon facts. However, as Feyerabend notes, Galileo criticized Aristotle for relying too much upon the experience, and paying insufficient attention to speculative reason! He quotes Galileo (from On Motion ): "[Aristotle] asserted [his theory of motion] on the basis of no other reason than to experience... But, to employ reasoning at all times rather than examples (for what we seek are the clauses of effects, and these causes are not given to us by experience)..." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , p. 182

"The second characteristic trait of the modern way of studying nature is the absence of a foundation . Though there is a lot of talk about the new and fertile foundation that Descartes, Galileo, and Newton introduced and used in their research, such a foundation cannot be found in practice ... Unlike Aristotelian philosophy, which requires , identifies , and uses a foundation in actual research , we now have a fundamentalist epistemology and entirely separate practice of research in philosophy of nature and science. This antagonist and the related irrationality of modern science is hidden by a slanted method of representation, which depicts even the most revolutionary discovery as resting on a solid foundation." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , pp. 173-174

"Note the tendency here [in Parmenides] that is commonplace in contemporary science: the thinker, that is, in antiquity the philosopher, deals with things that do not occur in intuition and that have paradoxical qualities. These are the things that are "real" for the thinker... The rift was never entirely overcome; rather, the "real world" became ever more remote from the world in which we live and feel. It becomes institutionalized until eventually the power of the growing institutions of science and an education regulated by them closes the rift from the other end by means of a kind of training that keeps transforming intuition, the behavior regulated by it, and thereby us humans as well until we obey the scientific forms of thought and see the world through them, as a junk room deserted by gods yet well organized." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , p. 153

"the disappearance of the gods… today... is generally regarded as 'rational,' and the gradual elimination of divine traces as a further increase in rationality. Yet this means identifying rationalism with materialism -- a dubitable procedure based on a naïve naturalistic interpretation of the material. It indicates an oversight of the possibility that materialism may have contradicted the contemporary experience of the world, and so it may be considered 'irrational' in light of an empiricist methodology." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , p. 105

"Thus, Anaximander's universe and its later modifications are uniform. And yet they are not complete. They do not contain mythological events, dreams or spawns of imagination... We push the events in question out of our physical world and into another world, which is conceived of either as a world consisting entirely of appearance, of non-reality, or as a very real yet non-physical world… In both cases we obtain an antiseptic real (physical) world at the expense of insurmountable problems: how can we reunify domains that are so radically separate? Increased specialization makes the problems disappear from the researchers' horizon, which only strengthens said researchers conviction that their professional ideology is indeed capable of successfully overcoming all difficulties." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , pp. 126-132.

I am currently reviewing Paul Feyerabend's Philosophy of Nature  for The British Journal for the History of Philosophy . Feyerabend worked on this book in the 1970s, but it was only released this year. This promises to be a wonderful review experience, since Feyerabend was a brilliant man, and in this work he reviews the "philosophy of nature" from the Stone Age to Bohm. And here is my first quote of note from the work: "The assumption that humans of the Stone or Bronze Age would have had only the most primitive knowledge of nature may be flattering to our progressivist self-image. But it has little plausibility since Stone Age humans were already fully developed members of the species Homo sapiens , and it is incompatible with recent research. The environmental and societal problems that the early Homo sapiens had to face were incomparably greater than the challenges facing our contemporary scientists. These problems has to be solved with the most primitive ...