VMST 2018: 8TH ANNUAL VALUES IN MEDICINE, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 2018
Feyerabend 2018: Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Science in a Free Society

A workshop in conjunction with the 2018 Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology Conference

Invited Speaker:

  • Kathleen Okruhlik, Department of Philosophy & Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario

Co-Organizers: Matthew J. Brown (UT Dallas) and Ian James Kidd (University of Nottingham)

Workshop Description:

2018 year marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Feyerabend’s book Science in a Free Society, his provocative engagement with philosophical issues concerning the authority of science in democratic societies. The book marks a shift of emphasis in Feyerabend’s philosophical concerns, away from epistemological and methodological issues in the physical sciences, and onto social and political issues – such as values in science, epistemic and cultural diversity, and the complicity of science in oppressive projects and systems. Read in this way, Science in a Free Society offers ways of connecting Feyerabend’s later work to subsequent developments in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, postcolonial science and technology studies, and political and socially engaged philosophy of science. This event explores the claim that Feyerabend anticipated these and other projects in philosophy of science, and that his later work can be profitably understood in their light.