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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Pope Quotes Feyerabend, and Gets in Big Trouble at Leading Italian University

Brian Leiter

Story here:

Pope Benedict XVI, in a rare papal acquiescence to protest, has canceled a speech at the prestigious Sapienza University here amid opposition by professors and students who say he is hostile to science….

Dozens of students staging a sit-in at the university, where banners have been hung urging Benedict to stay away, cheered after the statement was released….

[P]rofessors and students objected…specifically [to] a speech that Benedict gave in 1990, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on Galileo, condemned by the Inquisition in the early 1600s for arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

In that speech, Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005, quoted the Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying: “The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.”

Feyerabend was, of course, a somewhat irresponsible provocateur much of the time.  Does anyone know the precise context of this remark?  Is it as outlandish as it sounds?

(There is more detail here.  Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)

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29 responses to “Pope Quotes Feyerabend, and Gets in Big Trouble at Leading Italian University”

  1. Matt

    I believe it's a quote (or at least a paraphrase) from a chapter in _Farewell to Reason_. I read it quite a long time ago but recall that at least part of the argument was about how Galileo was himself quite a dogmatist and many of his arguments were quite bad, even in their own time. (His account of the tides, for example, doesn't at all fit with how the tides actually work.) I recall thinking that Feyerabend was more than a bit over the top in this analysis but it was good for pointing out that they story of Galileo as a mere honest seeker of truth is also more than a bit of a myth.

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  2. Angelo Bottone

    The 1990 discourse can be read here: http://ncrcafe.org/node/1541

    I am afraid that if Feyerabend was alive today he would not be allowed to speak in the University of Rome La Sapienza. What a shame!!

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  3. Mike Jacovides

    The passage is the chapter heading (translated into Italian and then back into English) of Chapter 13 of Against Method. Footnote 30 of the chapter in the 3rd edition refers to Ratzinger's quotation of Feyerabend. It is as outlandish as it sounds, but it's also an argued for conclusion of what seems to me to be one of the great works of analytic philosophy.

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  4. Ravi

    Assuming the "this" in "context of this remark" is a reference to PKF's quoted text, I am disappointed that you would castigate Feyerabend as a "irresponsible provocateur much of the time" without knowing the context of his text(s), at least in general. On the other hand, if you are aware of the general nature of PKF's work, it is even more disappointing to see you describe him as you do above.

    One unfortunate outcome of the "science wars" is that most non-scientists and philosophers (Fodor is perhaps a perfect example) have adopted a stunting but safe position in this binary struggle. PKF's writing (which neither pandered to scientism nor adopted science criticism as a fashionable pose) was provocative, I would agree, but in the most responsible (in the sense of addressing a very necessary threat in the arena of human ideas and activities) manner!

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  5. John Schwenkler

    Here's a fuller translation Ratzinger's 1990 remarks: http://ncrcafe.org/node/1541. Frankly, it's pretty hard to figure out what in the world he was saying, though it's clear enough that he doesn't intend /anything/ like an endorsement of Feyerabend's view: he simply goes through a few examples of postmodern, rather flat-footedly "relativistic" (in both the scientific and philosophical senses) responses to the Galileo incident, and closes by saying that his intention was not "to construct a hurried apologetics" for what the Church did, but rather to "recall a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity's doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology." In other words, the focus seems to be more on helping us to understand the present-day attitude toward reason: he says at the start that he wants to use "the different way in which the Galileo case is seen" – from thinking of Galileo as "a victim of that medieval obscurantism" to what he views as the relativistic, anti-rationalist consensus that prevails now – as a way to illustrate a "change in intellectual climate" from the 19th century to our own. He also says at the end that Christian faith "does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason" – once again, hardly an endorsement of the idea that the postmodern rejection of reason gets the Church off the hook.

    I'd say his remarks were unclear enough to cause some frustrated head-scratching, but on their own they certainly don't warrant a response like this one. Then again, I'd suspect that the root causes run a bit deeper …

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  6. Gilbert Harman

    This is presumably a quotation from 'Galileo and the Tyranny of Truth' reprinted in Feyerabend's book Farewell to Reason (1987). (I no longer have a copy of this book, so I can't check.)

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  7. Patrick S. O'Donnell

    The qoute is from Chapter 9, "Galileo and the Tyranny of Truth," in Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987): 247-264. This is a revised version of a talk he gave, "by tape," to the Pontifical Academy in Cracow, Poland in the 1980s. I found the essay to be quite interesting in its details, as it portends some of the critiques found in the fields of social epistemology and science and technology studies about the role of a certain kind of science ('post-academic,' according to John Ziman and what Steve Fuller terms 'Big Science': see the latter's The Governance of Science, 2000) in affluent societies. Read the essay: the quote does not do it justice. Agreee or disagree, Feyerabend's arguments are usually deserving of our undivided attention.

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  8. Tony Lloyd

    It's the abstract of Chapter 13 of "Against Method". It's slightly mis-quoted (I don't know whether that's the Pope or the newspaper).

    Feyerabend is playing a Tu Quoque on the authoritarian scientists of his (Feyerabend's) day. The basic thesis of the chapter is that they too would have acted as the inquisition did. They would have ruled Galileo out and refused to even entertain his right to put forward his theories. As is often the case with Feyerabend his dramatic prose tends to be backed up with good arguments. He specifies Michelson, Salvador Luria and Rutherford, and outlines what would have driven them to reject not just Galileo's theory but Galileo's right to put forward his theory. (see footnote 17)

    The actions of the scientists at the University just bear out Feyerabend's thesis. They will not entertain being spoken to by someone who does not accept fully their view of science. They will not entertain heretics. They will not discuss, even with those who merely quote heretical views.

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  9. Barry Stocker

    Page 133 of *Against Method*, 3rd edition 1993. 'To sum up: the judgement of the Church experts was scientifically correct and had the right social intention, viz, to protect people from the machinations of specialists. It wanted to protect people from being corrupted by a narrow ideology that might work in restricted domains but was incapable of sustaining a harmonious life. A revision of the judgement might win the Church some friends among scientists but would severely impair its function as a preserver of important and superhuman values.' Feyerabend argues that the Church was philosophically justified in opposing Galileo because its arguments against Galileo were those of Instrumentalist Philosophy of Science. They demanded that Galileo recognise that Copernican theory was a useful instrument in predicting observations, but was not true. I believe that Popper made the same comparison in *Conjectures and Refutations* but in order to attack Instrumentalism. Feyerabend's argument on the social and ethical aspect is that the Chucrh had an integrated world view in which Scripture defines the horizons of knowledge. Such a view is also a view about social harmony based on scriptural values. Since there is no correct method or final truth in science, it is perfectly reasonable for the Church to limit knowledge in that way, particularly as science develops through external impulses not through internally consistent method. Galileo himself was dishonest and inconsistent in both supporting and opposing Church doctrine. He was not harshly treated by the standards of the time, as he was merely placed under house arrest. On Feyerabend as provocateur, someone who studied with Lakatos and is now at UCl confirmed the impression to me fairly recently that Feyerabend wrote in a very rhetorical and provocative way without regard to whether he fully supported the positions he was using to make his anti-Rationalist points, at that time.

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  10. Michael Kremer

    Brian,

    The Pope's comments are from 1990, long before he was Pope. A longish excerpt from the text in which they occur is here: http://ncrcafe.org/node/1541

    The translation seems to me be pretty bad, and I don't have the Italian text from which this is excerpted (nor could I read it with ease if I did), but it looks like a pretty complicated story he's telling in which Feyerabend isn't obviously taken to be right.

    But to be honest I don't think the protests really have to do with this 1990 text. I think the protests have to do with deeper tensions between church and secular society in Italy. The text is being used to paint the Pope as anti-science. I don't myself think he is anti-science, but that can be debated — at least, I don't see this in the text that's being used as the basis of the protests.

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  11. Vera Tripodi

    Michael,

    I think you're right. The protests have not to do with Feyerabend's text. It's something deeper and it is complicated to explain and to sum up. I'm Italian and I was Phd-Student at La Sapienza University.

    In order to understand what is happening, I think we should distinguish two different issues.

    First, the questions is: how can we defend scientific research?

    A lot of students and some professors think that the visit of the Pope is simply intrusive and inappropriate, but not only because of what Ratzinger said about Galileo. The point is that the Rector of La Sapienza has invited the Pope to give a speech for the inauguration ceremony of the new academic year. It's the official inauguration and this seems to have political implications. La Sapienza is a public University and Italy should be a secular country. Last year there was an important debate in my country on the necessity to guarantee at all levels the freedom of scientific research (such as it is defined in Article 13 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights) and on the fact that this is absolutely essential to progress. A debate – for example – about embryonic stem cell research. This kind of freedom is not always guaranteed in Italy. In this, the Catholic Church plays not only a religious role but a relevant political one as well. Of course, students and professors think that this freedom must be used with a sense of responsibility by researchers, according to ethical principals, but not interfered with by religion convictions, which belong only in the private sphere. At La Sapienza, students and professors want to stress that research must be free.

    Second, the question is: Is Italy a secular country?

    The Rector of La Sapienza has invited some important politicians to the inauguration ceremony. This protest is also against the failure of public funding for Universities. In Italy, there is no money – politicians say – for Public Universities. At the same time Catholic Universities benefit from government funding. As result, to do research in Italy is very hard. In many cases, it's impossible. So, a lot of people decide to move to other countries.

    In my opinion, the Rector could invite the Pope in other occasion. In the past, the Pope (or the Dalai Lama for example) gave a talk at La Sapienza. But never the official speech.

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  12. Francesca di Poppa

    Vera has a point. I am also Italian (though my PhD is from Pitt's History and Philosophy of Science department). Ratzinger has given again and again the impression that he does not respect the autonomy of scientific research. Wojtyła's speeches on Galileo and on evolutionary biology, for example, show that he respected science and that he considered the past attitude of the Church a mistake. Ratzinger seems to think that scientific research ought to be subject to the dictates of the Christian faith-well, his version of it. Recently, the law on assisted reproductive techniques has been seen (with good reason) as an intrusion of Catholicism in what ought to be a secular state. Now the Vatican is insisting on revising the abortion law. In my humble opinion, Ratzinger is simply reaping what he has sown.

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  13. Rob Tempio

    Didn't Pierre Duhem hold similiar view regarding the Galileo, not so much about the Church considering the moral or social consequences, but about Galileo overstepping the bounds of his theory when he said the heliocentric view didn't just "save the phenomena" it was actually the case.

    Harry Frankfurt makes a similar defense of the Church's position in the last chapter of his recently reissued book, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen.

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  14. cosim

    The Church's verdict against Galileo Galilei was certainly not "rational and just". The story is somewhat more complicated that that, though. (SEP has a useful entry at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galileo/)

    In 1632, when Galileo published his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, it might well have been the case that old Ptolemy's geocentric theory fit data collected better than Copernicus's heliocentric theory. Moreover, Galileo's defense of Copernicus wasn't (fully) persuasive; parts of it were even flat wrong.

    But Galileo was right on the 'big picture' issue – this planet does, in fact, revolve around the sun! Right, although for the wrong reasons – how does that work? Galileo nonetheless enables revolutions in physics and in metaphysics. And even if it were the case that in 1633 – when Galileo was tried by Ratzinger's predecessors in his ex-office – that there was still a (legitimate) debate between heliocentric and geocentric views of the solar system, it was utterly ridiculous to try Galileo for heresy when he took one side in that debate.

    In a strange way, Ratzinger, of all people, who created a huge row when he quoted Manuel II's positively enlightened views on Islam, which the Pope later clarified by stating he did not mean to endorse Manuel II. So perhaps in this case too, we will find out that Ratzinger did not mean to endorse Feyerabend. (One is left with the feeling that Ratzinger seeks provocative quotations to put in addresses of his for use as rhetorical blasts, and if the ensuing (eminently foreseeable) controversy proves too much for the genteel Pope's liking, he thens states that he did not mean to endorse the quotation he deliberately picked out. (Ratzinger's 2006 Regensburg Address, quoting Manuel II, as subsequently amended post-delivery: http://www.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html).

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  15. Stephan Johnson

    As someone who actually took Feyerabend's Philosophy of Science class as an undergraduate and who enjoyed speaking with him about these things, I can attest to his anti-Galilean tendencies as well as his attitude that Ptolemaic astronomy was not the disaster it's usually presented as. I can also attest to his unbridled joy in saying these kinds of things to people whom he knew full well it would shock–that often seemed to be the main point.

    But to be fair, he did have some substance behind the love to shock (usually done in concert with a wave of his crutch–students in the front row lived in constant fear). His basic argument was to press what he took to be the weakness of Popperian philosophy of science, by its own standards of adequacy. If total observational adequacy be the litmus test, he thought Galileo couldn't meet that–at that time. Lakatos's advancing research program test wouldn't help either because the jury was still way out at that point. When you add in things like a synoptic view of the universe and a clear overarching explanation of how things 'hang together in the broadest sense of the term', then he argued Galileo was the clear loser.

    As a final aside, his own view was that, in determining which research programs to fund, the people's vote ought to be definitive. When we asked him what he would vote for, his response was 'I can't vote, I'm not a citizen.' That was Feyerabend, in a nutshell.

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  16. alex

    We (I mean italians) are falling back again into MiddleAge: cities buried in rubbish, a Pope telling politicians what to do, families in need of more money but anyway going to live in big towns (big towns are not cheap)… the only hope is that after a MiddleAge comes a Renaissance.

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  17. Edmundas Adomonis

    The popularity of Feyerabend among philosophers is really amazing. If anyone has made use of distorted history of science which is full of rhetorical devices and speculations tailored to his needs, that's Feyerabend for sure. It's a pity that introductory textbooks in philosophy of science pay so much attention to his ideas. Perhaps he is a good entertainer but fun is not the purpose of philosophy. His farewell to reason is certainly useful for all kinds of relativists to quote and tell rhetorically "Look where philosophers of science had ended up, etc." Besides, after him it is much more difficult to explain the point of philosophy of science to people outside philosophy.

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  18. Mohan Matthen

    Feyerabend was not the main issue as far as Ratzinger was concerned. Nor are his remarks about the rationality of the Church in its dispute with Galileo the most odious part of his "discourse".

    Ratzinger's central slander is that Galileo was somehow the precursor of modern weapons of mass destruction. He quotes the notoriously flaky German nuclear atom bomb worker, C. F. (von) Weizsacker as follows: there is a “very direct path that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb." Ratzinger comments that Weizsacker here took "another step forward" — unmistakably an endorsement.

    And then this odious slur: "To my great surprise, in a recent interview on the Galileo case, I was not asked a question like, ‘Why did the Church try to get in the way of the development of modern science?’, but rather exactly the opposite, that is: ‘Why didn’t the church take a more clear position against the disasters that would inevitably follow, once Galileo had opened Pandora’s box?’" You have to wonder: what would a "more clear position" have been?

    Ratzinger's message: Galileo's dynamics leads directly to war and destruction. It opens "Pandora's box". Better that we should have stuck with Aristotle.

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  19. John Schwenkler

    But that's once again to misrepresent what Ratzinger was doing in quoting those people: he's giving a sort of social history of the changing ways in which the Galileo case has been viewed in the twentieth century, and /not/ a statement of how he himself thinks of it.

    Hence he says at the very end of the address: "Here, I wished to recall a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology."

    Surely it's possible to /quote/ someone's claim that Galileo was wrong and the Church right, or that there was a close connection between the Galilean worldview and the development of the atomic bomb, without /endorsing/ those views!

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  20. Michael Kremer

    John Schwenkler: Yes. And more (see below).

    Mohan Matthen: I think you are reading far too much into this passage. Ratzinger was neither endorsing Feyerabend nor Weizsacker. Even the not very good translation at ncrcafe.org makes that clear — Ratzinger's conclusion was that "it would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason. Here, I wished to recall a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology."

    So his point was to show examples of increasing loss in faith in science and technology as holding the key to human salvation.

    But there is an official translation in the book A Turning Point for Europe (Ignatius Press, http://www.amazon.com/Turning-Point-Europe-World-Assessment-Forecast/dp/0898704618/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200937884&sr=8-1, now out of print). From this you will see (Amazon search-inside-the-book!) that the remarks translated at ncrcafe.org are only part of a longer address on "Paths of Faith in the Revolutionary Change of the Present Day." The general point is about the loss of faith in various ideologies that had sustained hope in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Ratzinger begins with Marxism (writing in 1989) and then moves on to "Analogies and Variations in the Western World" which is subdivided into "The Crisis of Faith in Science," "The Search for the Spiritual and the Ethical," and "New Religiosity," before concluding with "Paths of Faith Today."

    The offending passage comes from the section "The Crisis of Faith in Science," and the views of Feyerabend and Weiszacker are presented as extreme forms of this crisis of faith, which reject reason altogether and blame science for such things as the atomic bomb. Weizsacker took "another step forward" on this path, which is not the path that Ratzinger endorses. In the more official translation Ratzinger says that Feyerabend "sounds much more aggressive" than Bloch and that Weizsacker "goes even one step farther." The conclusion of the section then reads "It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views; faith does not grow out of resentment and skepticism with respect to rationality, but only out of a fundamental affirmation and a spacious reasonableness; we shall come back to this point. I mention all this only as a symptomatic case that permits us to see how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science and technology goes today." In this version it is even clearer than in the ncrcafe version that Ratzinger was not endorsing the views of Weizsacker and Feyerabend (whatever you may think of the "loss of faith" story that he tells).

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  21. Mohan Matthen

    Well I am glad we aren't dealing with the red herring about Feyerabend, though red herrings are what Ratzinger is about.

    Michael Kremer (by the way, your brother is a friend, so please call me Mohan): You're far too deep. Just look at what he says: Weizsacker took another step forward in tracing a direct line from Galileo to the atom bomb. What is the "self-doubt" that he wants to insinuate? Is he not saying that some scientists (such as Weizsacker) have themselves doubted Galileo's credentials, seeing how he (Galileo) more or less invented the bomb?

    Of course, there is a direct line from anything to anything if you are inclined to take that kind of view of the history of ideas. But what do you think he means when he says that Galileo opened Pandora's box?

    Thank you John Schwenkler: yes it is possible to quote somebody without endorsing their views. Very perceptive. Indeed, I quoted Ratzinger without endorsing him.

    The question is: did Ratzinger mean to muddy the Galilean waters by quoting everybody from soup (Weizsacker) to nuts (Feyerabend) agreeing that it was only right and proper that G should have been shown the instruments of torture. I think it's a reasonable reading of Rat's zinger that this kind of sophism is precisely what he was about.

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  22. Mark Murphy

    Matthen's reading is not at all reasonable. The Pandora's Box line bit occurs when Ratzinger is reporting what people had been asking him; it is not his own description of Galileo's work.

    Ratzinger's point is to note that in his experience the pendulum has swung from one unreasonable position to another: on one side, the standard Enlightenment tale of the persecution of Galileo by the forces of darkness, and on the other side, in which Galileo himself was the first move toward a technological mentality that results in the atomic bomb. His conclusion is that, against the fideists, "Faith does not grow out of resentment and scepticism with respect to rationality, but only out of a fundamental affirmation and spacious reasonableness." This is just Aquinas, people. Nothing to see here.

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  23. Mohan Matthen

    Ratzinger has a way of hiding behind quotes — but his intentions are reasonably clear from the words he uses to introduce the quotes. (Though I must say that I am going by the "translation" provided by the National Catholic Reporter, rather than the "paraphrase" offered on the same webpage, which is a good bit more innocuous.)

    First of all, R talks about the Enlightenment "myth" of Galileo — which is that Galileo was a "victim of medieval obscurantism". Notice that there are implicitly two parts of this "myth", the first is that G. was a victim, and second that the victimizers were obscurantists. R. concentrates his fire on the second part — but somehow manages to convey that there has been a debate about the oppressive nature of the Inquisition and not just about its rationality.

    The rhetoric on the second point (omitting Feyerabend) amounts to this.

    (1) Bloch opposed the Enlightenment "myth", offering a new "interpretation". According to Bloch, the "myth" is undermined by the Theory of Relativity. Now, first of all, Bloch's views on Relativity are somewhat simplistic (at least as quoted). The best way to translate heliocentrism into that Theory is something like this: "In an inertial frame of reference, the movement of the Sun around the centre of mass of the solar system is much smaller than that of the Earth" — or something like that. The geocentric frame of reference is not ontologically equivalent to an inertial one. (Maybe this needs to be qualified because of General Relativity.)

    (2) Weizsacker "takes another step forward", R. says, by tracing the direct line between Galileo and the atom bomb. Michael Kremer says that this was a step forward on a path that R. himself doesn't follow. Perhaps this is right. Nevertheless, R is not above putting an accusation in somebody else's mouth in order to undermine the credibility of Galileo.

    So, here is his position in a nutshell: "It used to be thought that Galileo was a victim of medieval obscurantism, but nowadays some very sophisticated people think he was not such a smart guy and an initiator of very bad historical trends. I don't endorse that, but (given that there is no smoke without fire?) you'd not be safe taking a stand against the Inquisition."

    No? Why bring in Bloch and Weizsacker in the first place?

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  24. Michael Kremer

    Mohan: OK, since you're Phil's friend, let's be friends. That won't stop me from criticizing your moves here.

    I agree that we should look at what Ratzinger says. I only suggest that when you look at what Ratzinger says you look carefully at all of what he says. This is a basic point about charitable reading: don't take things out of context. Which you continue to insist on doing. And no, that's not a reasonable way to read Ratzinger or anyone else. And putting things in context and actually trying to understand what is said is not being too deep. Rather, you're being too superficial.

    I have to say that your reading of Ratzinger seems to be conditioned by a belief that there must be something objectionable there (after all these words were written by Rat's zinger, ergo they must be nasty stuff). But I would say, slow down, pretend you didn't know who wrote the words, read them carefully, and ask yourself honestly whether there is anything objectionable in them.

    For example, Ratzinger doesn't say that Galileo opened Pandora's box. So your question "What do you think he means when he says that Galileo opened Pandora's box?" has a false presupposition. What Ratzinger actually says — just read his words — is that an interviewer implied that Galileo opened Pandora's box. Ratzinger says that this implication surprised him. He doesn't endorse the implication. As Mark Murphy says, this implication represents for Ratzinger one side of a dangerous oscillation between two extreme positions. He rejects it.

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  25. Mohan Matthen

    OK. Let's all be friends. And recognizing that friends sometimes get into arguments by being at cross purposes, let me say what for me are the central issues.

    Here is how (as a non-historian, but a philosopher of science who knows something about the substantive issues) I see the main issues:

    (a) Galileo made huge leaps forward in the conceptualization of modern physics and in the observation of the heavens; notwithstanding that he may very well have mistakes along the way, and that he is known sometimes to have been slapdash.

    (b) Whether or not he was right on how to state heliocentrism given General Relativity, his version was scientifically more productive than the opposition's. (Heliocentrism is not, of course, Galileo's contribution — but this is another matter.)

    (c) Regardless of (a) and (b), it was wrong for the Church to suppress him.

    I am offended by Ratzinger because the quotes he selected seemed to undermine (a) and (b), and to lure the unwary into thinking that some of these questions were were reopened by Relativity Theory. I am also offended because by not clearly stating (c); he seems to be offering an apologetic, albeit of a "we're not as obviously bad as some have said" variety. A straight admission of wrong-doing of the sort later offered by the previous Pope would have been well-taken, and would have provided a context within which his point about the crisis of science could better have been understood and appreciated.

    The side issue that we can table is whether R was playing a dialectical game. My earlier posts suggested he was, but (a) through (c) seem more crucial.

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  26. Dennis Arjo

    The speech Benedict was scheduled to deliver is available here: http://www.zenit.org/article-21526?l=english. The Vicar of Christ has apparently added Rawls and Habermas to his reading list.

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  27. Daniele Sgaravatti

    I wish to join other italians in defending the criticisms that were raised to the pope's visit at the univerisity "La Sapienza". As it was noted, the pope is a hugely influential figure in Italy, and he has political responsabilities. Feyerabends's quote is only a minor issue in this respect, but it is significant nonetheless. As the main representative of the very same institution that forced Galileo to publicly reject its scientific views, under the very realistic threat of being burned alive, the pope should have made clear, beyond reasonable doubt, that he was not endorsing Feyerabend's view, e.g. by saying "I am not endorsing Feyerabend's view"; instead he didn't do that, nor in the original speech, nor, strikingly enough, in the past few weeks, when it would have contributed hugely to calm down heated feelings.

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  28. David Hyder

    Michael, your post from January 21, 2008 at 12:19 PM confirms what I suspected. As was the case with the anti-Muslim remarks, people are once again ascribing views to him which he was in fact citing – in this instance Feyerabend and v. Weizsaecker exemplifying rationalists who have "lost their faith". Thanks for the info.

    Perhaps I might add that the "crisis of modernity" centering on Galileo to which the Pope alludes is hardly an invention of Ratz. Feyerabend v. Weiz. etc. Readers will recall that this was the title of Husserl's last book, the Crisis of the European Sciences. It begins with an analysis of Galilean science, and it was of course tremendously influential after the war in Germany and France.

    Whatever your philosophical predilections, it remains a fact that many readers of Husserl in the 30-50's took it for granted that there _was_ a crisis, and that it had something to do with science. More particularly, it was the long-term pathology of physicalism, which was the metaphysics of post-Galilean science. Long-term because it was now rearing its head in the centre of the human sciences, through, among other things, the psychologising of human thought.

    So in its philosophical guise, the crisis is the devaluation of philosophy through psychology, and on the religious side, it is the elimination of spirit through matter. But for everyone reading and writing on this topic in the period in question, the crisis was also the War: the manifest failure of enlightenment reason.

    Now, you may think this is all bullshit, but it certainly wouldn't have seemed that way to someone living in Europe in 1955. And, rightly or wrongly, this Pope does think like that.

    Essentially, these scandals are roughly what you'd expect when a band of journalists hack through the writings of a highly skilled academic employing the same critical standards as my student plagiarists: all statements, whatever their source, are to be ascribed to the person whose name appears under the title of the text in question.

    As an atheist phil of sci of Muslim descent, I'm hardly a fan of the Church. But, by God, we should be thankful to have this Pope, just as the one before him: these people have doctorates, they're highly reflective, nuanced thinkers.

    David Hyder

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  29. antonio allegra

    Even if it is quite late to intervene, I wish to say that almost everybody here in Italy agrees in regarding what happened at Sapienza as a mere censorship to Ratzinger. He is, among other things, also Rome's bishop; but he could not speak at Rome university (compare with public enemy Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia). Let's also explain that Ratzinger's speech was not the Official Big Speech, just one out of 3 or 4. Some years ago Woytila was speaking in Cuba and Nicaragua… and Italian Parliament too – which should be much more debatable, I guess, that an university.
    Maybe it is also the case to note, that if there is a problem specifically with Ratzinger's views (even if I don't understand exactly what this amounts to, as he was also, as everybody knows, Woytila's ghost writer), well, this is a perfect pluralism test: too easy to permit free speech to the ones we agree with 😉
    The opinions of my compatriots commenting above, are obviously minoritary in Italy.

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