Paul Feyerabend 1924 – 1994

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his anti-methodological critique of the philosophy of science. After early work in the orbit of the logical empiricists and Popper, he turned to a more radical position, expressed in Against Method, Science in a Free Society, and Farewell to Reason, in which no single methodological rule has ever survived the actual history of science and theoretical progress depends on a willingness to violate received standards. His long career at Berkeley and at the ETH Zurich made him one of the most provocative critics of scientific absolutism and one of the most engaging stylists of twentieth-century philosophy.

Paul Karl Feyerabend was born in 1924 in Vienna, the only child of an Austrian civil servant. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a teenager, he was decorated and severely wounded on the Eastern Front in 1945 — a wound that left him in pain and, much of the time, on a cane for the rest of his life. He returned to Vienna to study singing, history, and physics, took his doctorate in philosophy in 1951 under Viktor Kraft, and after a postdoctoral year with Karl Popper at the LSE chose academic philosophy.

He taught principally at Berkeley from 1958 and at the ETH Zurich from 1980, with shorter posts at Bristol, Berlin, London, and Yale. His major works are Against Method (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), Farewell to Reason (1987), Three Dialogues on Knowledge, Conquest of Abundance (posthumous), and the autobiographical Killing Time (1995).

Feyerabend argued for an 'epistemological anarchism' in which 'anything goes' as a regulative slogan: the history of science shows that no method, including the rules favored by Popper or Lakatos, has been consistently followed by the scientists who have made decisive advances. His defense of theoretical pluralism, his polemic against scientism, and his late reflections on the abundance of human cultures provoked a long debate that continues. He died of a brain tumor at Zurich in February 1994.