Great minds think alike. Having recently read Feyerabend’s Tyranny of Science I was reminded of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung), a key text in Critical Theory and the Frankfurt school. I had never managed more than the first chapter of Dialectic, but that was already enough to find surprising parallels. Feyerabend doesn’t mention Adorno or Horkheimer in his autobiography, but he sure converged on some of the same ideas.
“For thousands of years mathematicians believed there were just 2 types of geometry, the plane and the sphere. But another more aberrant structure lurks beneath the surface of Euclid’s laws – one that has been illuminated through the art of crochet.” *
You’ve heard correctly: crochet!
The Institute for Figuring features many ways to make abstract topics more accessible, one of them is to crochet models of hyperbolic spaces. A whole institute dedicated to aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics — this is awesome!
Science is simple! At least, great minds have found simple formulas to describe it. For Paul Feyerabend it’s Anything Goes. For Karl Popper it’s Falsify! Falsify! Falsify! And Carl Sagan called science a self-correcting process that is perfect for finding out what’s true.
But how do these grand ideas hold up in practice?
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In October 2011 PLoS Biology, a top biology journal, tried something new – it took a deeper look at the boundary between biology and philosophy:
“Does the cultural divide between science and the humanities, first articulated by C. P. Snow over 50 years ago, still exist between biology and philosophy? In a mini experiment to find out, we asked a philosopher and biologist to review the recent English translation of Tyranny of Science, by 20th century philosopher Paul Feyerabend, perhaps best known for rejecting the claim that science is a singular discipline unified by common methods and concepts.”
What a nice idea! The philosopher is Ian J Kidd from Durham in the UK, who does research on Feyerabend and other philosophers of science, while the biologist is Axel Meyer from Konstanz in Germany, who studies diversity in fish. And Feyerabend (1924-1994) is a very good choice, because he is notorious as a polemic writer and not known for holding back his opinions. If there is any divide of any kind anywhere, Feyerabend will be right in the thick of it.
