Call for Papers (Deadline November 30, 2023)

Paul Feyerabend and Austrian Philosophy - His Formative Years in Postwar Vienna
International Conference - July 5-6, 2024 - University of Vienna, Campus, Court 1

Paul K. Feyerabend (1924-1994), one of the most stimulating and controversial figures of Twentieth-Century philosophy, spent most of his formative years in postwar Vienna (1946-1955). Born in Red Vienna, Feyerabend came of age at the time of the Nazi Anschluss and completed his philosophical apprenticeship at the University of Vienna during the Allied occupation. At the time of his university studies in philosophy and physics, Feyerabend animated the so-called “Third Vienna Circle” (1949-1953) around Viktor Kraft in the context of the Austrian College Society, and actively participated in the European Forum Alpbach and in the Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst. In addition, he served as a research assistant to Arthur Pap, who spent 1953/54 as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Vienna.

The international conference “Paul Feyerabend and Austrian Philosophy” aims at exploring the milieu which shaped Feyerabend’s intellectual development with a focus on his interaction with university teachers and intellectual figures such as members of the former Vienna Circle like Viktor Kraft, Philipp Frank, Herbert Feigl, and Rudolf Carnap, physicists like Felix Ehrenhaft and Walter Thirring, as well as with Walter Hollitscher and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Contacts continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s at the London School of Economics with Karl Popper and, later, with Imre Lakatos, and in Minneapolis, at Feigl’s Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, where Feyerabend published his pathbreaking “Against Method” for the first time in 1970.

A special symposium on the publication of Feyerabend’s Formative Years, edited by Matteo Collodel and Eric Oberheim (Springer Nature, two volumes) will be held as part of this conference.

The conference is organized by the Institute Vienna Circle (University of Vienna) and by the Vienna Circle Society. It is partnered with the subsequent HOPOS 2024, the Fifteenth International Congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, University of Vienna, July 8-12, 2024, and it contributes to the Feyerabend 2024 Centennial celebrations.

Invited Speakers

Vasso Kindi (University of Athens)

Martin Kusch (University of Vienna)

Call for Abstracts
We invite abstracts of up to 400 words, excluding footnotes and bibliography.

Please format your abstract as a pdf file for anonymous review, excluding any personal and institutional information and submit it through EasyChair.

If your abstract is selected for the conference, you will not be required to submit a full paper.

Submission deadline: November 30, 2023
Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2024

There will be no registration fee.

Organizing Committee

Friedrich Stadler (University of Vienna)
Matteo Collodel (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Daniel Kuby (University of Konstanz)

Queries and Questions

matteo.collodel[at]unive.it
friedrich.stadler[at]univie.ac.at