Three Dialogues on Knowledge

The Socratic, or dialog, form is central to the history of philosophy and has been the discipline′s canonical genre ever since. Paul Feyerabend′s Three Dialogues on Knowledge resurrects the form to provide an astonishingly flexible and invigorating analysis of epistemological, ethical and metaphysical problems. He uses literary strategies – of irony, voice and distance – to make profoundly philosophical points about the epistemic, existential and political aspects of common sense and scientific knowledge. He writes about ancient and modern relativism; the authority of science; the ignorance of scientists; the nature of being; and true and false enlightenment. Throughout Three Dialogues on Knowledge is provocative, controversial and inspiring. It is, unlike most current philosophical writing, written for readers with a keen sense of what matters and why.

First Dialogue (1990). Second Dialogue (1976). Third Dialogue (1989). Postscript.

Paul K. Feyerabend (1924–1994) was professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He was previously Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, the Free University of Berlin, University College, London, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Against Method (1988), Farewell to Reason (1987) and Philosophical Papers (1984).

"An audacious thinker, a brilliant polemicist, an iconoclast ..." Publishers′ Weekly