Abstract/Summary

Paul Feyerabend was indebted to certain physicist-philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann. My paper is a critical study of some main aspects of the latter’s influence on Feyerabend. I begin by outlining Feyerabend’s account of the role and influence of Boltzmann’s scientific work, especially his role as ‘the last pillar’ of atomism and the mechanical world-view. Then, endorsing Feyerabend’s 1967 contention that Boltzmann’s philosophy had been neglected, I pay tribute to his role in drawing attention to it. Moving on to Feyerabend’s basic claims about Boltzmann’s philosophy, I first agree with him that Boltzmann was an evolutionary thinker, and thus a confirmed fallibilist. I then deal with the two most constant themes in Feyerabend’s mentions of Boltzmann, that Boltzmann was a pioneer pluralist, and that he endorsed a certain kind of anti-empiricism. While the identification of Boltzmann as a pluralist is correct and important, I urge reservations about the idea that he opposed empiricism. Feyerabend’s view of logic seems to have been a radicalised version of Boltzmann’s, so I discuss Boltzmann’s views on logic, and argue that his evolutionary approach to that subject was one of the less convincing aspects of his philosophy. I then discuss the vexed issue of whether or not we should think of Boltzmann as committed to ‘scientific realism’. At first, Feyerabend identified him straightforwardly as such. Under the influence of Martin Curd’s unpublished doctoral dissertation on Boltzmann, though, he clearly began to have doubts. The formulation he eventually came up with was that Boltzmann endorsed ‘the positivistic version of scientific realism’. I explain what that version was supposed to be. I conclude that although Feyerabend’s picture of Boltzmann is somewhat one-sided, he does deserve credit for keeping the views of these philosopher-physicists in focus during an era in which they were overshadowed by philosophies of science deriving from logical positivism and critical rationalism.