## 1. A Brief Chronology of Feyerabend's Life and Work




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| 1924 | Born in Vienna. Son of a civil servant and a seamstress. |
| 1940 | Was inducted into the *Arbeitsdienst* (the work service
introduced by the Nazis). |
| 1942 | Drafted into the Pioneer Corps of the German army. After basic
training, volunteered for Officers' School. |
| 1943 | Learned of his mother's suicide. |
| 1944 | Decorated, Iron Cross. Advanced to Lieutenant. Lectured to
Officers' School. |
| 1945 | Shot in the hand and in the belly during the retreat from the
Russian Army. The bullet damaged his spinal nerves. |
| 1946 | Received a fellowship to study singing and stage-management in
Weimar. Joined the "Cultural Association for the Democratic
Reform of Germany". |
| 1947 | Returned to Vienna to study history and sociology at the
University. Soon transferred to physics. First article, on the concept
of illustration in modern physics, published. Feyerabend "a
raving positivist" at the time. |
| 1948 | First visit to the Alpbach seminar of the Austrian College
Society. Became secretary of the seminars. Met Karl Popper and Walter
Hollitscher. Married first wife, Edeltrud. |
| 1949 | Became student leader of the "Kraft Circle", a
student philosophy club centred around Viktor Kraft,
Feyerabend's dissertation supervisor and a former member of the
Vienna Circle. Ludwig Wittgenstein visited the Kraft Circle to give a
talk. Feyerabend also met Bertolt Brecht. |
| 1951 | Received doctorate in philosophy for his thesis on "basic
statements". Applied for a British Council scholarship to study
under Wittgenstein at Cambridge. But Wittgenstein died before
Feyerabend arrived in England, so Feyerabend chose Popper as his
supervisor instead. |
| 1952 | Came to England, to study under Popper at the London School of
Economics. Concentrated on the quantum theory and Wittgenstein.
Studied the typescript of Wittgenstein's *Philosophical
Investigations*, and prepared a summary of the book. Befriended
another of Popper's students, Joseph Agassi. |
| 1953 | Feyerabend returned to Vienna. Popper applied for an extension
to his scholarship, but Feyerabend decided to remain in Vienna
instead. Translated Popper's *The Open Society and its
Enemies* into German. Declined the offer to become Popper's
research assistant. Agassi took the post. Feyerabend became research
assistant to Arthur Pap in Vienna. |
| 1954 | First articles on quantum mechanics and on Wittgenstein
published. Pap introduced Feyerabend to Herbert Feigl. |
| 1955 | Took up his first full-time academic appointment as lecturer in
philosophy at the University of Bristol, England. His summary of
Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations* appeared as
a review of the book in *The Philosophical Review*. |
| 1956 | Married second wife, Mary O'Neill. Published an article on
the "paradox of analysis". Feyerabend got to know the
quantum physicist David Bohm, whose ideas were to influence him
substantially. |
| 1957 | Gave a paper on the quantum theory of measurement to the Colston
Research Symposium at the University of Bristol. |
| 1958 | Took up visiting lectureship at the University of California,
Berkeley. Two of his most important early papers, "An Attempt at
a Realistic Interpretation of Experience", and
"Complementarity" appeared in the proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society. In them, Feyerabend argued against positivism
and in favour of a scientific realist account of the relation between
theory and experience, largely on grounds familiar from Karl
Popper's falsificationist views. |
| 1959 | Accepted a permanent position at Berkeley, and applied for a
Green Card to work in the US. |
| 1960 | As a result of earlier discussions with Herbert Feigl,
Feyerabend published "Das Problem der Existenz theoretischer
Entitaten", in which he argued that there is no special
"problem" of theoretical entities, and that *all*
entities are hypothetical. Gave two lectures to Oberlin College, Ohio,
in which he embroidered on Popper's views about the pre-Socratic
thinkers. |
| 1962 | "Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism" appeared.
Criticised existing empiricist accounts of explanation and theoretical
reduction (Hempel, Nagel), and introduced the concept of
incommensurability, based on the "contextual theory of
meaning" which Feyerabend claimed to find in
Wittgenstein's *Investigations*. |
| 1963 | "How to be a Good Empiricist", a position paper
summing up his point of view, was published, along with his two main
articles on the Mind/Body Problem in which he introduced the position
now known as "eliminative materialism". |
| 1965 | Publication of the first part of the essay "Problems of
Empiricism", and his "Reply to Criticism", in which
Feyerabend made his last serious attempt to construct a
"tolerant", "disinfected" empiricism. Although
beginning to put some distance between himself and Popper, Feyerabend
was still able to write a glowing review of Popper's
*Conjectures and Refutations*. |
| 1967-8 | Focus of his published papers had by now moved to
"theoretical pluralism", the view that in order to
maximise the chances of falsifying existing theories, scientists
should construct and defend as many alternative theories as possible.
Feyerabend's articles "On a Recent Critique of
Complementarity" defended Niels Bohr's views against
Popper's critique. Popper not amused. |
| 1969 | In a tiny article, "Science Without Experience",
Feyerabend finally gave up the attempt to be an empiricist, arguing
that in principle experience is necessary at *no* point in the
construction, comprehension or testing of empirical scientific
theories. |
| 1970 | Publication of "Consolations for the Specialist", in
which Feyerabend attacked Popper from a Kuhnian point of view, and the
essay version of "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic
Theory of Knowledge", in which "epistemological
anarchism" was revealed for the first time. Feyerabend claimed
to be applying the liberalism of John Stuart Mill's *On
Liberty* to scientific methodology. Published little during the
next few years. |
| 1974 | Death of Feyerabend's friend Imre Lakatos, putting paid to
their plans to produce a dialogue volume, *For and Against
Method*. Feyerabend, lecturing at the University of Sussex, was
ill too. Published a scathing review of Popper's *Objective
Knowledge*. |
| 1975 | Appearance of Feyerabend's first book, *Against
Method*, setting out "epistemological anarchism",
whose main thesis was that there is no such thing as *the*
scientific method. Great scientists are methodological opportunists
who use any moves that come to hand, even if they thereby violate
canons of empiricist methodology. |
| 1976-7 | Feyerabend replies to most of the major reviewers of *Against
Method*. Got depressed. Published his first major article on
relativism: the first time he explicitly endorsed the view. |
| 1978 | *Science in a Free Society* appears, including replies to
reviewers of *Against Method*. Some clarification of
epistemological anarchism, and very little retreat from the position
set out in *AM*. Explored further the political implications of
epistemological anarchism. The book also included one of
Feyerabend's major endorsements of relativism, one of the views
for which he was becoming known. First volume of the German edition of
Feyerabend's philosophical papers appears. (Feyerabend published
increasingly in German from this point onwards). |
| 1981 | English publication of the first two volumes of
Feyerabend's *Philosophical Papers*, with new material in
introductory chapters. |
| 1983 | Met Grazia Borrini at his Berkeley lectures. |
| 1984 | Publishes "Science as an Art", in which he defends
an explicitly relativistic account of the history of science according
to which there is change, but no "progress". Also
continues his campaign to rehabilitate Ernst Mach. |
| 1987 | Publication of *Farewell to Reason*, a volume collecting
some of the papers Feyerabend had published between 1981 and 1987.
Relativism again at the forefront, especially in its
"Protagorean" version. |
| 1988 | Second, revised edition of *Against Method*, omitting the
long chapter on the history of the visual arts, but now incorporating
parts of *Science in a Free Society*, appeared. |
| 1989 | Paul and Grazia married in January. Left for Italy and
Switzerland in the fall, at least partly because of the effects of the
October earthquake in California. |
| 1990 | Officially resigned from Berkeley in March. |
| 1991 | Retired from Zurich. *Three Dialogues on Knowledge* and
*Beyond Reason*, a festschrift edited by a former pupil,
Gonzalo Munevar, published. Also lots of small publications,
many of them in *Common Knowledge*. Signs of an increasing
unhappiness with relativism in Feyerabend's publications around
this time. But still vigorously opposed to
"objectivism". |
| 1993 | Third edition of *Against Method* published. Feyerabend
developed an inoperable brain tumour, and was hospitalized. |
| 1994 | Feyerabend died in the Genolier clinic (Genolier, Canton of
Vaud, Switzerland), February 11th. Several major memorial symposia and
colloquia on his work took place over the next two years. |
| 1995 | *Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend*
published. |
| 1999 | *Conquest of Abundance* published. |


## 2. Feyerabend's Early Life



(Unless otherwise stated, page references are to *Killing Time: The
Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend*, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), henceforth referred to as *"KT"*).



### 2.1 Youth (1924 -1938)



Paul Karl Feyerabend was born into a middle-class Viennese family in
1924. Times were hard in Vienna in the nineteen-twenties: in the
aftermath of the First World War there were famines, hunger riots, and
runaway inflation. Feyerabend's family had a three-room
apartment on the *Wolfganggasse*, "a quiet street lined
with oak trees" (p. 11). The first chapters of his autobiography
give the impression of his being a strange child, whose activities
were entirely centred around his own family, and who was cut off from
neighbors, other children and the outside world because "[t]he
world is a dangerous place" (p. 15). Between the ages of three
and six, Feyerabend recalls, he spent most of his time in the
apartment's kitchen and bedroom. Occasional visits to the cinema
and numerous stories, especially stories with a magical aura, seem to
have taken the place usually filled by childhood friends. He was a
sickly child, but ran away from home once, when he was five years old
(p. 7). When he started school at the age of six, he "had no
idea how other people lived or what to do with them" (p. 16).
The world seemed to be filled with strange and inexplicable
happenings. It took him some while to get used to school, which
initially made him sick. But when he did so, his health problems had
disappeared. When he learned to read, he found the new and magical
world of books waiting for him, and indulged himself to the full (p.
25). But his sense of the world's inexplicability took some time
to dissipate--he recalls feeling that way about events during the
nineteen-thirties and throughout the second world war.



Feyerabend attended a *Realgymnasium* (High School) at which he
was taught Latin, English, and science. He was a
*Vorzugsschuler*, that is, "a student whose grades
exceeded a certain average" (p. 22), and by the time he was
sixteen he had the reputation of knowing more about physics and math
than his teachers. But he also got thrown out of school on one
occasion.



Feyerabend "stumbled into drama" (p. 26) by accident,
becoming something of a ham actor in the process. This accident then
led to another, when he found himself forced to accept philosophy
texts among the bundles of books he had bought for the plays and
novels they contained. It was, he later claimed, "the dramatic
possibilities of reasoning and... the power that arguments seem
to exert over people" (p. 27) with which philosophy fascinated
him. Although his reputation was as a philosopher, he preferred to be
thought of as an entertainer. His interests, he said, were always
somewhat unfocussed (p. 27).



However, Feyerabend's school physics teacher Oswald Thomas
inspired in him an interest in physics and astronomy. The first
lecture he gave (at school) seems to have been on these subjects (p.
28). Together with his father, he built a telescope and "became
a regular observer for the Swiss Institute of Solar Research"
(p. 29). He describes his scientific interests as follows:



> 
> I was interested in both the technical and the more general aspects of
> physics and astronomy, but I drew no distinction between them. For me,
> Eddington, Mach (his *Mechanics* and *Theory of Heat*),
> and Hugo Dingler (*Foundations of Geometry*) were scientists
> who moved freely from one end of their subject to the other. I read
> Mach very carefully and made many notes. (p. 30).
> 



Feyerabend does not tell us how he became acquainted with another one
of his main preoccupations--singing. He was proud of his voice,
becoming a member of a choir, and took singing lessons for years,
later claiming to have remained in California in order not to have to
give up his singing teacher. In his autobiography he talks of the
pleasure, greater than any intellectual pleasure, derived from having
and using a well-trained singing voice (p. 83). During his time in
Vienna in the second world war, his interest led him to attend the
opera (first the *Volksoper*, and then the *Staatsoper*)
together with his mother. A former opera singer, Johann Langer, gave
him singing lessons and encouraged him to go to an academy. After
passing the entrance examination, Feyerabend did so, becoming a pupil
of Adolf Vogel. At this point in his life, he later recalled: 



> 
> The course of my life was... clear: theoretical astronomy during
> the day, preferably in the domain of perturbation theory; then
> rehearsals, coaching, vocal exercises, opera in the evening...;
> and astronomical observation at night... The only remaining
> obstacle was the war. (p. 35).
> 


### 2.2 The *Anschluss* (1938)



Feyerabend tells how, without falling for Adolf Hitler's
charisma, he appreciated Hitler's oratorial style. Austria was
re-unified with Germany in 1938. Jewish schoolmates were treated
differently, and Jewish neighbours and acquaintances started
disappearing. But, as usual, Feyerabend had no clear view of the
situation: 



> 
> Much of what happened I learned only after the war, from articles,
> books, and television, and the events I did notice either made no
> impression at all or affected me in a random way. I remember them and
> I can describe them, but there was no context to give them meaning and
> no aim to judge them by. (pp. 37-8).
> 
> 
> For me the German occupation and the war that followed were an
> inconvenience, not a moral problem, and my reactions came from
> accidental moods and circumstances, not from a well-defined outlook.
> (p. 38).
> 
> 
> 



The general impression given by his autobiography is of an imaginative
but fairly solitary person with no stable or well-defined personality.
Rather, his decisions and courses of action seem to have been the
result of a struggle between his tendency to conform and his
contrariness. Just as when he was a child, events happening around him
seemed strange, distant, and out of context. It is very difficult to
see him identifying with any group, and he must have made an unlikely
soldier. 


### 2.3 The War (1939-1945)



As far as his army record goes, Feyerabend claims in his autobiography
that his mind is a blank. But in fact this is one of the periods he
tells us most about. Having passed his final high school exams in
March 1942, he was drafted into the *Arbeitsdienst* (the work
service introduced by the Nazis), and sent for basic training in
Pirmasens, Germany. Feyerabend opted to stay in Germany to keep out of
the way of the fighting, but subsequently asked to be sent to where
the fighting was, having become bored with cleaning the barracks! He
even considered joining the SS, for aesthetic reasons. His unit was
then posted at Quelerne en Bas, near Brest, in Brittany. Still, the
events of the war did not register. In November 1942, he returned home
to Vienna, but left before Christmas to join the Wehrmacht's
Pioneer Corps. 



Their training took place in Krems, near Vienna. Feyerabend soon
volunteered for officers' school, not because of an urge for
leadership, but out of a wish to survive, his intention being to use
officers' school as a way to avoid front-line fighting. The
trainees were sent to Yugoslavia. In Vukovar, during July 1943, he
learnt of his mother's suicide, but was absolutely unmoved, and
obviously shocked his fellow officers by displaying no feeling. In
December that same year, Feyerabend's unit was sent into battle
on the northern part of the Russian front, but although they blew up
buildings, they never encountered any Russian soldiers.



Despite the fact that Feyerabend reports of himself that he was
foolhardy during battle, treating it as a theatrical event, he
received the Iron Cross (second class) early in March 1944, for
leading his men into a village under enemy fire, and occupying it. He
was advanced from private soldier to lance corporal, to sergeant, and
then, at the end of 1944, to lieutenant. At the end of November that
year, he gave a series of lectures to the officers' school at
Dessau Rosslau, near Leipzig. Their theme was the
("historicist") one that "historical periods such as
the Baroque, the Rococo, the Gothic Age are unified by a concealed
essence that only a lonely outsider can understand" (p. 49). His
description of these lectures, and of his notebook entries at the
time, reveals the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in their
fascination with this "lonely outsider", "the
solitary thinker" (p. 48).



Having returned home for Christmas 1944, Feyerabend again boarded the
train for the front, this time for Poland, in January 1945. There he
was put in charge of a bicycle company. Although he claims to have
relished the role of army officer no more than he later did that of
university professor, he must have been at least a competent soldier,
since in the field he came to take the place of a sequence of injured
officers: first a lieutenant, then a captain, and then a major, before
he was shot during another heroic act of carelessness performed in the
1945 retreat westwards from the Russian army. The bullet lodged in his
spine left him temporarily paralysed from the waist down, meaning that
he spent time in a wheelchair, then on crutches, and thereafter walked
with the aid of a stick. The war ended as he was recovering from his
injury, in a hospital in Apolda, a little town near Weimar, while
fervently hoping not to recover before the war was over.
Germany's surrender came as a relief, but also as a
disappointment relative to past hopes and aspirations. He later said
of his stint in the army that it was "an interruption, a
nuisance; I forgot about it the moment it was over" (p.
111).


### 2.4 Post-War Activities (1945-1947)



However, the war took its toll even on Feyerabend. The bullet in his
spine left him impotent for the rest of his life. (His descriptions of
subsequent sexual encounters are one of the more amusing parts of his
autobiography). Although he started off completely ignorant of women,
he married four times, and had, by his own account, plenty of affairs.
But he seems to have been distant not just in his relationship with
his parents, but in some of his marriages too. He hated the slavery
love seemed to imply, but hated equally the freedom achieved by taking
evasive action. He got bogged down in cycles of dependence, isolation,
and renewed dependence, which only dissolved into a more balanced
pattern after many years. 



At the end of the war, Feyerabend went to the mayor of Apolda and
asked for a job. He was assigned to the education section, given an
office and a secretary and, fittingly, put in charge of
entertainment.



In 1946, having recovered from paralysis, he received a state
fellowship to return to study singing and stage-management for a year
at the *Musikhochschule* in Weimar. He moved from Apolda to
Weimar after about three months. At the Weimar *Institut zur
Methodologischen Erneuerung des Deutschen Theaters* he studied
theatre, and at the Weimar academy he took classes in Italian,
harmony, piano, singing and enunciation. Singing remained one of his
life's major interests. He attended performances (drama, opera,
ballet, concerts) at Weimar's *Nationaltheater*, and
later reminisced about opera stars of the time, recalling debates and
arguments about theatre (e.g. the stereotyping of roles and plays)
with Maxim Vallentin, Hans Eisler, etc. He also played a small part in
one of the films of G.W.Pabst, a notable German film-director.
Although, by his own account, he led a full life, he became restless
and decided to move.


## 3. Feyerabend's Turn to Philosophy: The Vienna Circle, Popper, and Wittgenstein


### 3.1 Return to Vienna: University Life, Alpbach, and Popper (1947-1948)



Feyerabend therefore returned, still on crutches, to his
parents" apartment house in Vienna's 15th district.
Although he planned to study physics, maths and astronomy, he chose
instead to read history and sociology at the University of
Vienna's *Institut fur Osterreichische
Geschichtsforschung*, thinking that history, unlike physics, is
concerned with real life. But he became dissatisfied with history, and
returned to theoretical physics. Together with a group of science
students, who all regarded themselves as far superior to students of
other subjects, Feyerabend invaded philosophy lectures and seminars.
Although this was not his first contact with philosophy, it seems to
have been the period which cemented his interest. He recalls that in
all interventions he took the radical positivist line that science is
the basis of knowledge; that it is empirical; and that nonempirical
enterprises are either logic or nonsense (p. 68). These views would
have been familiar from the climate of Logical Positivism which found
its main root in the Vienna Circle, a group of scientifically-minded
philosophers who, in the nineteen-twenties and "thirties sought
to deploy the newly-revitalised formal logic of Gottlob Frege and
Russell and Whitehead's *Principia Mathematica* to
represent the structure of human knowledge. As we shall see,
Feyerabend's youthful positivist scientism makes quite a
contrast with his later conclusions. 



In August 1948, at the first meeting of the international summer
seminar of the Austrian College Society in Alpbach which he attended,
Feyerabend met the philosopher of science Karl Popper, who had already
made a name for himself as the Vienna Circle's "official
opposition". (The Austrian College Society had been founded in
1945 by Austrian resistance fighters, "to provide a forum for
the exchange of scholars and ideas and so to prepare the political
unification of Europe" (*Science in a Free Society*, p.
109)). In his 1934 book *Logik der Forschung* Popper had
elaborated the straightforward and appealing falsificationist view
that great science could be characterised as a process in which
thinkers put forward bold conjectures and then do their best to
improve them by trying to refute them. Instead of trying to develop an
inductive logic, Popper argued for the (deductivist) view that
scientific method could be characterised in terms of logically valid
deductive inferences.



Popper's own autobiography, unfortunately, tells us nothing
about their meeting or their relationship, despite the fact that he
was to be the largest single influence (first positive, then negative)
on Feyerabend's work. For those hoping that Feyerabend might use
the occasion of his autobiography to settle accounts with his
erstwhile philosophical conscience, it is disappointing that the book
tells us so little about his acquaintance with Popper. Elsewhere
Feyerabend tells us that he



> 
> admired [Popper's] freedom of manners, his cheek, his
> disrespectful attitude towards the German philosophers who gave the
> proceedings weight in more senses than one, his sense of
> humour... [and] his ability to restate ponderous problems in
> simple and journalistic language. Here was a free mind, joyfully
> putting forth his ideas, unconcerned about the reaction of the
> "professionals". (*SFS*, p. 115).
> 



But Popper's ideas themselves, Feyerabend alleges, were not new
to him, deductivism having been defended as early as 1925 by Viktor
Kraft, and falsificationism being "taken for granted" at
Alpbach. Popper's ideas, he remarks, were also similar to those
of another Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (!), although
"more abstract and anaemic" (*SFS*, p. 116). Over
the following years, Feyerabend attended the Alpbach symposium about
fifteen times, first as a student, then as a lecturer and seminar
chair. He was offered, and accepted, the post of "scientific
secretary" to the society, and this he calls "the most
decisive step of my life" (p. 70). In fact, it is this decision
which answers his self-addressed questions about the origin of his
career, his reputation, and his situation at the time of writing his
autobiography, since he traces his situation back to it. 



At Alpbach he was also approached by communists, including the Marxist
intellectual Walter Hollitscher, who became his teacher and friend.
Feyerabend resisted Hollitscher's political arguments on the
basis of his own "youthful elitism" and "an almost
instinctive aversion to group thinking" (p. 73). But although
Feyerabend later described himself as having been "a raving
positivist" at the time, it was Hollitscher, he says, who
persuaded him of the cogency of realism about the "external
world" (Popper's important arguments for realism came
somewhat later). The considerations Hollitscher deployed were, first,
that scientific research was conducted on the assumption of realism,
and could not be otherwise conducted, and, second, that realism is
fruitful and productive of scientific progress, whereas positivism was
simply a commentary on scientific results, barren in itself.



> 
> Hollitscher never presented an argument that would lead, step by step,
> from positivism to realism and he would have regarded the attempt to
> produce such an argument as philosophical folly. He rather developed
> the realist position itself, illustrated it by examples from science
> and commonsense, showed how closely it was connected with scientific
> research and everyday action and so revealed its strength.
> (*SFS*, p. 113).
> 



Feyerabend eventually developed these thoughts in a fascinating series
of papers beginning in 1957, arguing that science needs realism in
order to progress, and that positivism would stultify such progress.
The argument was entirely in line with Popper's approach, as
well as with his conclusions. 


### 3.2 Early Contact with Wittgenstein (1948-1952)



Feyerabend's principal intellectual engagement in the late 1940s
and early 1950s was in his capacity as student leader of the
"Kraft Circle". Viktor Kraft was a former member of the
Vienna Circle, and became Feyerabend's dissertation supervisor.
The Kraft Circle was a philosophy club centred around Kraft, which
constituted another part of the Austrian College Society. Bela Juhos,
Walter Hollitscher, Georg Henrik von Wright, Elizabeth Anscombe and
Wittgenstein were all visiting speakers. Feyerabend reports that the
Circle held meetings from 1949 to 1952 or 1953 (*SFS*, p. 109),
that they set themselves the task of "considering philosophical
problems in a nonmetaphysical manner and with special reference to the
findings of the sciences" ("Herbert Feigl: A Biographical
Sketch", in P. K.Feyerabend & G.Maxwell (eds.), *Mind,
Matter, and Method: Essays in Philosophy and Science in Honor of
Herbert Feigl*, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1966), pp. 1-2) and that their main topics of discussion were
the questions of the reality of theoretical entities and of the
"external world". About Wittgenstein's lecture,
Feyerabend recalls the following: 



> 
> Not even a brief and quite interesting visit by Wittgenstein himself
> (in 1952) could advance our discussion. Wittgenstein was very
> impressive in his way of presenting concrete cases, such as amoebas
> under a microscope... but when he left we still did not know
> whether or not there was an external world, or, if there was one, what
> the arguments were in favour of it. (Feyerabend & Maxwell ibid.,
> p. 4. Note that Feyerabend must have got the date wrong, since
> Wittgenstein died in April 1951).
> 
> 
> Wittgenstein, who took a long time to make up his mind and then
> appeared over an hour late gave a spirited performance and seemed to
> prefer our disrespectful attitude to the fawning admiration he
> encountered elsewhere. (*SFS*, p. 109).
> 
> 
> 



In 1949, Feyerabend was introduced to Bertolt Brecht, and Hollitscher
offered him the opportunity to become one of Brecht's production
assistants, but he turned it down, later describing this as one of the
biggest mistakes of his life (*SFS*, p. 114). In the
autobiography, however, he retracts this statement, saying that he
would not have enjoyed being part of the closely knit group that
surrounded Brecht. (The reasons for his later defection from the
Popperian camp seem to have been similar). 



The University of Vienna's physicists were Hans Thirring, Karl
Przibram, and Felix Ehrenhaft. Feyerabend admired Thirring and
Ehrenhaft, and was influenced by Ehrenhaft, who had lectured on
physics there from 1947. Ehrenhaft was known as a fierce and
independent critic of all kinds of orthodoxy in physics, but was
sometimes thought of as a charlatan. Feyerabend reports that he and
his fellow science students looked forward to exposing him as a fraud,
but in fact were treated, at the 1949 Alpbach seminar, to a battle
between Ehrenhaft and the orthodox in which the former presented his
experiments but the latter defended their position by using strategies
which Galileo's opponents would have been proud of, ridiculing
Ehrenhaft's phenomena as mere *Dreckeffects*. Feyerabend
commented that "Only much later did Ehrenhaft's lesson
sink in and our attitude at the time as well as the attitude of the
entire profession provided me then with an excellent illustration of
the nature of scientific rationality" (*SFS*, p. 111).
Ehrenhaft did not convince the theoreticians, who protected themselves
with an iron curtain of dogmatic belief of exactly the same kind as
that deployed by Galileo's opponents. His audience remained
staunch empiricists, never doubting that science had to be adapted to
facts. Feyerabend commented that the day-to-day business of science,
what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science", cannot exist
without this kind of "split consciousness".



At the University of Vienna, although he had originally planned to
submit a thesis on physics, Feyerabend swapped to philosophy when he
got nowhere with the electrodynamics problem he was calculating (the
philosopher of science as failed scientist?). He completed his
doctoral thesis, "*Zur Theorie der
Basissatze*" in 1951 under Kraft's supervision.
The subject of the thesis was "basic sentences", or
"protocol sentences", i.e. the kind of sentences that, the
Logical Positivists had theorised, comprise the foundations of
scientific knowledge. He later reported that in his philosophical work
he had "started from and returned to the discussion of protocol
statements in the Vienna Circle" ("Concluding
Unphilosophical Conversation", in Munevar (1991), p.
526). This is unsurprising, given that Kraft was then the Vienna
Circle's only survivor in Vienna. However, Kraft's
influence on Feyerabend has only recently been emphasised. Much of the
material from Feyerabend's thesis was presented at (or gleaned
from) meetings of the Kraft Circle, and also appears in his early
articles, such as "An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of
Experience" (1958). The thesis itself was "a condensed
version of the discussions in the Kraft Circle" (p. 115).



In the early 1950's, Feyerabend published several German papers
on Wittgenstein, written as a result of having read the proofs of the
*Philosophical Investigations*, lent to him by Elizabeth
Anscombe. Feyerabend first met Anscombe when lecturing on Descartes to
the Austrian College Society. Anscombe had come to Vienna to perfect
her German in order to translate Wittgenstein's works.



> 
> She gave me manuscripts of Wittgenstein's later writings and
> discussed them with me. The discussions extended over months and
> occasionally proceeded from morning over lunch until late into the
> evening. They had a profound influence upon me though it is not at all
> easy to specify particulars. (*SFS*, p. 114).
> 



Feyerabend planned to study with Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and
Wittgenstein was prepared to take him on as a student, but he died
before Feyerabend arrived in England. Karl Popper became his
supervisor instead. 


### 3.3 Life at the London School of Economics (1952-1953)



In Feyerabend's autobiography, we are told a little about
Popper's lectures and his famous LSE seminar. The lectures began
with the claim that there is no method in science, but that there
*are* some simple and helpful rules of thumb. Popper tried to
show "how simple ideas that were derived from equally simple
requirements brought order into the complex world of research"
(pp. 88-9). Having being convinced by Popper's and Pierre
Duhem's critiques of inductivism (the view that science proceeds
through generalisation from facts recorded in experience), Feyerabend
considered falsificationism a real option, and, he says, "fell
for it" (p. 89), applying falsificationism in his papers and
lectures. This is not his first admission that he was a
falsificationist, but it is notable that he did not see it as
entailing his having been a Popperian. Feyerabend was (usually) a
fairly *liberal* falsificationist, always emphasising the
tenacity with which scientists should defend their theories, and
allowing that scientific theories can start by being untestable.
Faithful Popperians like John Watkins and Joseph Agassi, he
emphasises, continually ticked him off for being unorthodox (he was
later accused, by Agassi, of plagiarising from Popper). Instead he
later saw this interlude as an example of the dangers of abstract
reasoning. Rationalism is already dangerous, since it "paralyses
our judgment" (p. 89) and is invested with "an almost
superhuman authority" (p. 90). But Popper added a further
dangerous element: *simplicity*. Such a philosophy, complains
Feyerabend, "may be out of touch with reality... [that is],
with scientific practice" (p. 90).



Feyerabend is here referring to Popper's approach to the
epistemology of science, which he himself followed and furthered for
quite a while. In chapter II of *The Logic of Scientific
Discovery* (1934), Popper had distinguished between scientific
practice and scientific standards, principles, or methodology. Arguing
against a "naturalistic" theory of method which makes
standards depend on practice, Popper opted instead for a strongly
normative epistemology, a discipline which lays down optimum rules of
method for scientists to follow. This is one of the most important
aspects of the Popperian perspective which Feyerabend originally took
on board.



Such an epistemology, Feyerabend now complains, makes the false
assumption that "rational" standards can lead to a
practice that is as mobile, rich and effective as the science we
already have. Falsificationism would destroy science as we know it.
Science did not develop in accordance with Popper's model. It is
not "irrational", but it contains no overarching pattern.
Popper's rules could produce a science, but not the science we
now have. (Feyerabend remarks that the Logical Positivist Otto Neurath
had already put this criticism of Popper some time before (p.
91)).



In 1952, Feyerabend presented his ideas on scientific change to
Popper's LSE seminar and to a gathering of illustrious
Wittgensteinians (Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, H.L.A.Hart and
Georg Henrik von Wright) in Anscombe's Oxford flat. This meeting
seems to have been the first airing of the important concept of
*incommensurability* (although not the term itself, which crept
into publications only a decade later):



> 
> On one occasion which I remember vividly Anscombe, by a series of
> skilful questions, made me see how our conception (and even our
> perceptions) of well-defined and apparently self-contained facts may
> depend on circumstances not apparent in them. There are entities such
> as physical objects which obey a "conservation principle"
> in the sense that they retain their identity through a variety of
> manifestations and even when they are not present at all while other
> entities such as pains and after-images are "annihilated"
> with their disappearance. The conservation principles may change from
> one developmental stage of the human organism to another and they may
> be different for different languages (cf. Whorf's "covert
> classifications"... ). I conjectured that such principles
> would play an important role in science, that they might change during
> revolutions and that deductive relations between pre-revolutionary and
> post-revolutionary theories might be broken off as a result.
> (*SFS*, p. 115).
> 
> 
> Major discoveries, I said, are not like the discovery of America,
> where the general nature of the discovered object is already known.
> Rather, they are like recognizing that one has been dreaming.
> (*KT*, p. 92).
> 
> 
> 



These thoughts received an unenthusiastic reception from Hart, von
Wright and Popper. 



Feyerabend's articles on Wittgenstein culminated in his review
of the *Philosophical Investigations*, the text of which he
studied in detail while he was in London. ("Being of a pedantic
turn of mind", he says, "I rewrote the book so that it
looked more like a treatise with a continuous argument".
(*SFS*, p. 116)). Anscombe translated Feyerabend's
summary into English and sent it to *The Philosophical Review*.
It was accepted by the editor, Norman Malcolm (having been turned down
by Gilbert Ryle, editor of *Mind*--see *KT*, p.
93). This review was Feyerabend's first English-language
publication; he called it his "Wittgensteinian monster"
(p. 115). He later commented:



> 
> I knew that Wittgenstein did not want to present a theory (of
> knowledge, or language), and I did not expressly formulate a theory
> myself. But my arrangements made the text speak like a theory and
> falsified Wittgenstein's intentions. (*KT*, p. 93).
> 
> 
> Wittgenstein's emphasis on the need for concrete research and
> his objections to abstract reasoning ("Look, don't
> think!") somewhat clashed with my own inclinations and the
> papers in which his influence is noticeable are therefore mixtures of
> concrete examples and sweeping principles. (*SFS*, p. 115).
> 
> 
> 



In his review of the *Philosophical Investigations*, he
summarised the book in a very effective way, drawing particular
attention to Wittgenstein's critique of a family of
"realist" or "essentialist" theories of
meaning according to which the meaning of a word is the object
designated or referred to by that word. Feyerabend argued that
Wittgenstein was attempting a *reductio ad absurdum* of realist
theories, showing that they had the untenable implication that we
could not be said to know the meaning of words which we nevertheless
constantly use in totally unproblematic ways.



Unfortunately, as argued in Preston 1997 (ch.2), Feyerabend completely
failed to follow up this insight by endorsing Wittgenstein's
non-representationalist conception of meaning, according to which the
meaning of a term is determined by its *use*. Instead, wrongly
associating the idea that meaning is use with positivism, Feyerabend
proferred what he called a "contextual" theory of meaning,
which identified the meaning of a term or statement with whatever role
it plays in *theoretical* contexts. But he over-extended the
idea of the theoretical to cover *any* context whatever, thus
completely depriving it of content. For Feyerabend, the theoretical
contrasts with nothing at all.



The book review was also critical of Wittgenstein, though. Notably, it
railed against Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy (as
"philosophical analysis"). In a short article published
the next year (1956), Feyerabend expanded on his critique, arguing
that consideration of G.E.Moore's famous "paradox of
analysis" showed that "*philosophy cannot be analytic
and scientific*, i.e., interesting, progressive, about a certain
subject matter, informative *at the same time*" ("A
Note on the Paradox of Analysis", p. 95). Feyerabend thenceforth
plumped for (what he conceived of as) *scientific* philosophy.
Like Popper, he had very little time for the kind of
"analytic" philosophy or "linguistic"
philosophy which followed in Wittgenstein's wake, and with which
Oxford University dominated the philosophical scene in the 1950s and
early 1960s.



One of the things that comes across most clearly from his
autobiography is the consistently malleable nature of
Feyerabend's views. He records that his friend Agassi caused him
completely to change his mind about a book he considered translating.
When Agassi urged Feyerabend to become a faithful Popperian,
Feyerabend's resistance seems to have been based mainly on his
aversion to groups.


### 3.4 Return to Vienna (1953-1955)



By the summer of 1953, when Popper had to apply for extra funds to
allow Feyerabend to work as his assistant, Feyerabend had decided to
leave the Popperian church and return to Vienna. Although the
assistantship was soon approved, Feyerabend "felt quite
uncomfortable. I couldn't put my finger on it; I only knew that
I wanted to remain in Vienna" (p. 99). 



During this period Feyerabend, having nothing to do and needing the
money, translated Popper's "war effort", *The
Open Society and its Enemies* into German, wrote articles on
"Methodology" and "Philosophy of Nature" for a
French encyclopaedia, produced a report on post-war developments in
the Humanities in Austria for the U.S. Library of Congress, and made a
mess of his first professional opportunity as a singer (p. 98). But he
also felt that he did not know what to do in the long run, so he
applied for jobs in various universities.



He then met Arthur Pap, "who had come to Vienna to lecture on
analytic philosophy and who hoped, perhaps somewhat unrealistically,
that he would be able to revive what was left from the great years of
the Vienna Circle and the analytic tradition there"
("Herbert Feigl: A Biographical Sketch", p. 3). Feyerabend
became Pap's assistant. Pap arranged for him to meet Herbert
Feigl in Vienna in 1954, and together they studied Feigl's
papers. Feigl had been a member of the Vienna Circle until his
emigration to the USA in 1930, but he had never given up the
"realist" view that there is a knowable external world. He
convinced Feyerabend that the positivism of Kraft and Pap had not
solved the traditional problems of philosophy. His paper
"Existential Hypotheses" (1950), together with
Kraft's contributions and certain ideas Popper had put forward
at Alpbach in 1948 and 1949, greatly diminished Feyerabend's
doubts about realism (ibid., p. 4). Here is how Feyerabend recounts
Feigl's influence:



> 
> It was ... quite a shock to hear Feigl expound fundamental
> difficulties and to hear him explain in perfectly simple language
> without any recourse to formalism why the problem of application [of
> the probability-calculus] was still without a solution. Formalization,
> then, was not the last word in philosophical matters. There was still
> room for fundamental discussion-for speculation (dreaded word!); there
> was still a possibility of overthrowing highly formalized systems with
> the help of a little common sense! (ibid., p. 5).
> 



1954 saw the publication of the first of Feyerabend's many
articles on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, the first fruits of
the time he spent studying with Popper. In these publications, he
generally took the line that the dominance achieved by the
"Copenhagen Interpretation" of the quantum theory was
undeserved. Feyerabend was particularly keen to argue that it had not
and could not be shown that this interpretation of the theory was a
general panacea for the problems of microphysics, or that its
defenders could justifiably believe it to be unassailable. He came to
defend the right of "hidden-variables" theorists such as
Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, and Jean-Pierre Vigier to hypothesise
the existence of an unobserved deterministic substructure underpinning
the apparently indeterministic cavortings of objects on the
quantum-mechanical level. 



However, Feyerabend also came to think that Popper's earlier
critique of the Copenhagen orthodoxy had been somewhat limited and
superficial. According to Popper, the Copenhagen Interpretation was
simply the result of some bad positivistic philosophising. Niels Bohr
and Werner Heisenberg, on this view, had been seduced by positivist
philosophers (like Ernst Mach and his ostensible followers, the Vienna
Circle) into thinking that their theory was not conjectural but was
merely a compendious, economical but non-hypothetical
*description* of experience. Feyerabend argued that, on the
contrary, the Copenhagen theorists had some perfectly good
"physical", "scientific", or
"factual" arguments for thinking that their view alone was
currently compatible with the observed results of experiments. He
therefore put forward a *defence* of their instrumentalist
interpretation of the quantum theory. But the defence was only
tactical, since he ultimately argued that the observed results of
experiments themselves needed to be *challenged* by a point of
view which would reveal their truth or falsity. So Feyerabend used the
quantum case to push for a reconsideration of the methodological rules
to which scientists subscribe. This is the genesis of his idea of a
"pluralistic" test model, in which theories are compared
with one another, as well as against "experience". (Note,
however, that this idea can already be found in Popper, and that
Feyerabend did initially acknowledge this fact). According to
Feyerabend, only by endorsing scientific realism can the scientist
cleave to a methodology which would consistently bring out the
(conceptually) *revolutionary* potential of scientific
theories, rekindling the kind of fire Galileo had lit under the
Aristotelian world-view. Such a realism interprets theories
*not* as summaries of experience, but as genuine conjectures
about a mind-independent reality. It also puts the
observation-language of science in the same epistemological boat as
its theoretical terms: observations, he urged, are just as
"theoretical" (that is, hypothetical) as theories:
"Logically speaking, all terms are
"theoretical"" (*Philosophical Papers, Volume
1*, p. 32 note).


## 4. Feyerabend's Early Work: Liberalizing Empiricism


### 4.1 First Academic Appointment: the University of Bristol (1955-1958)



In 1955, with the help of references from Popper and Erwin
Schrodinger, as well as his own big mouth (*SFS*, p. 116,
*KT*, p. 102), Feyerabend secured his first academic post
lecturing in philosophy of science at the University of Bristol,
England. In his autobiography (pp. 103-4) he describes how
Agassi had to help him prepare for these lectures, since they covered
a subject Feyerabend had never studied (see also *SFS*, p.
116). He also describes how for some time he felt directionless and
unsettled: he was "killing time". 



In the summer of that year, he again visited Alpbach, where he met the
philosopher of science Philipp Frank (another former Logical
Positivist), who exerted on him a (somewhat delayed) influence:



> 
> Frank argued that the Aristotelian objections against Copernicus
> agreed with empiricism, while Galileo's law of inertia did not.
> As in other cases, this remark lay dormant in my mind for years; then
> it started festering. The Galileo chapters of *Against Method*
> are a late result. (*KT*, p. 103. See also *SFS*, p.
> 112).
> 



Around the same time, Feyerabend met David Bohm, who was lecturing in
physics at the University of Bristol. Bohm had been the favoured
protege of Niels Bohr, and his first book, *Quantum
Theory* (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1951), was a lengthy
defence of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum theory. But in
the early 1950s Bohm rejected his former view, and became one of the
leading defenders of the then-unpopular "hidden-variables"
theory. He was to be a significant influence on Feyerabend, weaning
him away from Popper with his somewhat Hegelian account of the
structure of reality. Feyerabend produced a critical study of
Bohm's 1957 book *Causality and Chance in Modern Physics*
in 1960, when he was still very much under Popper's influence.
In their later work, though, Bohm and Feyerabend moved in parallel
directions, towards an interest in "fringe" science. And
Bohm's ideas sunk in gradually, having visible effects on
Feyerabend's published productions from the mid-1960s
onwards (see Van Strien 2020). Feyerabend increasingly flirted with
the vaguely Hegelian metaphysic that he had discerned and critiqued in
Bohm's book.



In 1956, Feyerabend got married for the second time, this time to one
of his former students, Mary O'Neill. But this relationship
seems to have been very short-lived, for he reports that his wife
spent Christmas 1957 away from him with her parents, that she
subsequently had an affair, and that the last time he saw her was
1958.



Feyerabend remembers his Bristol lecture course on quantum mechanics
as being a disaster. However, in the summer of 1956, along with Alfred
Lande, he chaired a successful seminar on philosophical issues
in quantum mechanics at Alpbach. A related success was his
contribution to the 1957 Colston Research Symposium, where he gave a
paper "On the Quantum Theory of Measurement". Here
Feyerabend introduced what was to become a long-running theme in his
work: that there is no separate and neutral
"observation-language" or "everyday language"
against which the theoretical statements of science are tested, but
that "the everyday level is *part of* the theoretical
rather then something self-contained and independent"
(*Philosophical Papers, Volume I*, p. 217, emphasis added).
This was his principal contribution to his central subject, the
relation between theory and experience. It constituted not only a
decisive break with the positivist conception of theories, but also
something of a step beyond Popper's conception.


### 4.2 The University of California at Berkeley: Early Years (1958-1964)



In the summer of 1957, Feyerabend accepted an invitation from Michael
Scriven to visit the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science in
Minneapolis. The Center was, as Feyerabend later said, "one of
the foremost institutions in the field" (p. 115). There he met
Feigl, Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Adolf Grunbaum,
Grover Maxwell, E.L.Hill, Paul Meehl, and others. He returned to the
Center in 1958, having accepted another invitation to work there,
backed by an NSF grant. He often went back there in subsequent years.




Around this time, many of Feyerabend's most important early
papers were published. In them, under the influence of both Popper and
Wittgenstein, Feyerabend initiated a vigourous critique of the
then-orthodox philosophies of science provided by descendants of the
Vienna Circle, "Logical Empiricist" thinkers such as
Rudolph Carnap, Feigl, Nagel, and Hempel. This critique was conducted
through a study of the relationship between observation and
theory.



In perhaps the most important of these early publications, "An
Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience" (1958),
Feyerabend argued against positivism and in favour of a scientific
realist account of the relation between theory and experience, largely
on grounds familiar from Karl Popper's falsificationist views.
Positivist theories of meaning, he complained, have consequences which
are "at variance with scientific method and reasonable
philosophy" (*Philosophical Papers, Volume 1*, p. 17). In
particular, they imply what Feyerabend dubbed the "stability
thesis", that even major changes in theory will not affect the
meanings of terms in the scientific observation-language. Against this
supposition, Feyerabend defended what he called "Thesis
I", the idea that



> 
> *the interpretation of an observation-language is determined by the
> theories which we use to explain what we observe, and it changes as
> soon as those theories change*. (ibid., p. 31).
> 



Thesis I reversed the direction of interpretation which the
positivists had presupposed. Instead of meaning seeping upwards from
the level of experience (or the observation-language), Feyerabend had
it trickling down *from* theory *to* experience. For
him, theory is meaningful independently of experience, rather than
vice-versa. The roots of this view clearly lie in his contextual
theory of meaning, according to which meaning is conferred on terms by
virtue of their participation in *theoretical* contexts. It
seems to imply that there is no principled semantic distinction
between theoretical terms and observation terms. And Feyerabend soon
followed up this implication with his "Pragmatic Theory of
Observation", according to which what is important about
observation-sentences is not their having a special core of empirical
meaning, but their causal role in the production and refutation of
theories. 



In 1958, Feyerabend had been invited to spend one year at the
University of California at Berkeley, and accepted. When this visiting
appointment ended, the University administration decided to hire him
on the basis of his publications and, of course, his big mouth (p.
115). But because of his grant to work at Minneapolis, he only started
lecturing full-time at Berkeley in 1960. There he encountered Thomas
Kuhn, and read Kuhn's forthcoming book *The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions* in draft form. He then wrote to Kuhn about
the book (these letters have recently been published in *Studies in
the History and Philosophy of Science*, 26, 1995). But he was not
quite ready to take on Kuhn's descriptive-historical approach to
the philosophy of science. Although more and more historical examples
peppered his published work, he was still using them to support fairly
orthodox falsificationist conclusions.



In his meta-methodology, Feyerabend applied to the dispute over the
interpretation of scientific theories a strong measure of Popperian
methodological conventionalism, arguing that the dispute between
realists and instrumentalists is not a factual issue but a matter of
choice. We can choose to see theories either as descriptions of
reality (scientific realism) or as instruments of prediction
(instrumentalism), depending on what ideals of scientific knowledge we
aspire to. Adherence to these competing ideals (roughly: high
informative content on the one hand, and sense-certainty on the other)
is to be judged by their respective consequences. Stressing that
philosophical theories have not merely reflected science but have
*changed* it, Feyerabend argued further that the *form*
of our knowledge can be altered to fit our ideals. So we can
*have* certainty, and theories that merely summarise
experience, if we wish. But, mobilising the usual equation between
empirical content and testability (common to Carnap, Popper and
Feyerabend), he urged that we should decisively reject the ideal of
certainty and opt instead for theories which go beyond experience and
say something informative about reality itself. In this respect, he
clearly followed Popper's lead, reconstruing empiricism as a
doctrine about the most desirable form for our theories, rather than
as a view about the sources of knowledge.



Feyerabend argued that the idea, common to positivists, that the
interpretation of observation terms doesn't depend upon the
status of our theoretical knowledge, has consequences undesirable to
positivists. One of these is that "every positivistic
observation language is based upon a metaphysical ontology"
(*Philosophical Papers, Volume 1*, p. 21). Another follows from
the thesis, which he relishes, that the theories we hold influence our
language, and maybe even our perceptions. This implies that as long as
we use only one empirically adequate theory, we will be unable to
imagine alternative accounts of reality. If we also accept the
positivist view that our theories are summaries of experience, those
theories will be void of empirical content and untestable, and hence
there will be a diminution in the critical, argumentative function of
our language. Just as purely transcendent metaphysical theories are
unfalsifiable, so too what began as an all-embracing scientific theory
offering certainty will, under these circumstances, have become an
irrefutable dogma, a *myth*. It is argued in Preston 1997
(chapter 5) that his antipathy toward this "myth
predicament" was one the main driving-forces behind
Feyerabend's views at the time.



Feyerabend defended a realism according to which "the
interpretation of a scientific theory depends upon nothing but the
state of affairs it describes" (*Philosophical Papers, Volume
1*, p. 42). At the same time he claimed to find in
Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations* a
contextual theory of meaning according to which the meaning of terms
is determined not by their use, nor by their connection with
experience, but by the role they play in the wider context of a theory
or explanation. Thesis I, the key proposition of Feyerabend's
early work, is supposed to encapsulate *both* the contextual
theory of meaning and scientific realism. Only realism, by insisting
on interpreting theories in their most vulnerable form as
universally-quantified statements which strive for truth, leads to
scientific progress instead of stagnation, he argued. Only realism
allows us to live up to the highest intellectual ideals of critical
attitude, honesty, and testability.



Unlike positivism, which conflicts with science by taking experiences
as unanalysable building-blocks, realism treats experiences as
analysable, explaining them as the result of processes not immediately
accessible to observation. Experiences and observation-statements are
thus revealed as more complex and structured than positivism had
realised. Feyerabend over-extended the contextual theory of meaning to
apply not only to theoretical terms but to observation terms too,
arguing that there is no special "problem" of theoretical
entities, and that the distinction between observation terms and
theoretical terms is a purely pragmatic one. If, as the contextual
theory also implies, observation-statements depend on theoretical
principles, any inadequacy in these principles will be transmitted to
the observation-statements they subtend, whence our beliefs about what
is observed may be in error, and even our experiences themselves can
be criticised for giving only an approximate account of what is going
on in reality. *All* our statements, beliefs and experiences
are "hypothetical". Observations and experiments always
need interpretation, and different interpretations are supplied by
different theories. If existing meanings embody theoretical
principles, then instead of passively accepting
observation-statements, we should attempt to find and test the
theoretical principles implicit in them, which may require us to
change those meanings.



Feyerabend therefore idolised semantic instability, arguing that the
semantic stability presupposed by positivist accounts of reduction,
explanation and confirmation, has been and should be violated if we
want progress in science. If meaning is determined by theory, terms in
very different theories simply cannot share the same meaning: they
will be "incommensurable". Any attempt to derive the
principles of an old theory from those of a new one must either be
unsuccessful or must effect a change in the meaning of the old
theory's terms. The "theoretical reduction" beloved
of Logical Empiricists is therefore actually more like
*replacement* of one theory and its ontology by another. At the
end of his well-known 1962 paper "Explanation, Reduction, and
Empiricism", in which he introduced the concept of
incommensurability, Feyerabend concluded that this concept precluded
any formal account of explanation, reduction or confirmation.
(Kuhn's book *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*,
in which the same term was used to characterize a related concept, was
published in the same year).



In his first major published excursion from the philosophy of science,
Feyerabend applied these ideas to the mind/body problem. In two papers
published in 1963, he sought to defend materialism (roughly, the view
that everything which exists is physical) against the supposition that
the mind cannot be a physical thing. Although these papers exhibit a
rather unclear mixture of views, they are now remembered primarily for
having ushered in the position known as *"eliminative
materialism"*, according to which our way of conceiving the
mind and mental phenomena amounts to a seriously inadequate theory
which is in conflict with a (materialistic) scientific account of
those same things. Feyerabend suggested that the two theories in
question were incommensurable, but that nevertheless we ought to
prefer the materialistic one on general methodological grounds. This
radical view of the mind/body problem has been one of
Feyerabend's most important legacies. Even though Feyerabend
himself seems to have given it up in the late 1970s, it was taken up
by Richard Rorty and, more recently, by Paul and Patricia
Churchland.



In Feyerabend's version of the incommensurability thesis, the
semantic principles of construction underpinning a theory (in its
*realist* interpretation) can be violated or
"suspended" by another theory. As a result, theories
cannot always be compared with respect to their content, as
"rationalists" would like. It took Feyerabend a while to
see it, for he did *not* officially subscribe to this view
until the late 1960s, but this opens the door to relativism, the view
that there is no objective way of choosing between theories or
traditions. This is perhaps the most notorious and widely-reviled
consequence of the contextual theory of meaning.



In the ground-breaking central papers from this period of
Feyerabend's oeuvre such as "How to be a Good
Empiricist" (1963), "Realism and Instrumentalism"
(1964), "Problems of Empiricism" and "Reply to
Criticism" (1965), his most important argument for scientific
realism was methodological: realism is desirable because it demands
the proliferation of new and incompatible theories. This leads to
scientific progress because it results in each theory having more
empirical content that it otherwise would, since a theory's
testability is proportional to the number of potential falsifiers it
has, and the production of alternative theories is the only reliable
way to ensure the existence of potential falsifiers. So scientific
progress comes through *"theoretical pluralism"*,
allowing a plurality of incompatible theories, each of which will
contribute by competition to maintaining and enhancing the
testability, and thus the empirical content, of the others. According
to Feyerabend's *pluralistic test model*, theories are
tested against one another. He thus idealised what Kuhn called
"pre-paradigm" periods and "scientific
revolutions", occasions when there are many incompatible
theories, all forced to develop through their competition with each
other. But he downplayed the idea that theories are still compared
with one another primarily for their ability to account for the
results of observation and experiment. For Feyerabend, this idea was
an empiricist myth which disguised the role of aesthetic and social
factors in theory-choice.



Thus far, the argument for theoretical pluralism largely follows that
of John Stuart Mill's *On Liberty* (1859), to which
Feyerabend often paid homage. But Feyerabend went on to try to
demonstrate a mechanism whereby theories can augment their empirical
content. According to this part of the argument, theories may face
difficulties which can only be discovered with the help of alternative
theories. A theory can be incorrect without our being able to discover
this in a direct way: sometimes the construction of new experimental
methods and instruments which would reveal the incorrectness is
excluded by laws of nature, sometimes the discrepancy (were it to be
discovered) might be regarded as an oddity, and might never be given
its correct interpretation. Circumstances can thus conspire to hide
from us the infirmities of our theory. The methodological
"principle of testability" demands that we develop
alternative theories incompatible with the existing theory, and
develop them in their strongest form, as descriptions of reality, not
mere instruments of prediction. Instead of waiting until the current
theory gets into difficulties, and only then starting to look for
alternatives, we ought vigorously to proliferate theories and
tenaciously defend them in the hope that they may afford us an
*indirect refutation* of our existing theory. Only theories
which are empirically adequate will thus contribute to raising the
empirical content of their fellows. But Feyerabend insists that
*any* theory, no matter how weak, may *become*
empirically adequate, and so may contribute to this process. To be a
realist, he therefore suggests, involves demanding support for any
theory, including implausible conjectures having no independent
empirical support, conjectures which are inconsistent with data and
well-confirmed laws. We should retain theories that are in trouble,
and invent and develop theories that contradict the observed
phenomena, just because in doing so we will be respecting the
intellectual ideal of testability.



In thus appealing to the "principle of testability" as the
supreme methodological maxim, Feyerabend forgets that testability must
be traded-off against other theoretical virtues. Only his pathological
fear of theories losing their empirical content and becoming myths
leads him to want to maximise testability and embrace an absolutely
unrestricted principle of proliferation. He also disregards historical
evidence that anti-realist approaches can be just as pluralistic as
realism.



At Alpbach in 1964, Feyerabend and Feigl jointly directed a seminar on
the recent development of analytic philosophy. There Feyerabend
re-encountered the leading light of the Logical Positivist movement,
Rudolph Carnap (whom he had already met at UCLA). Carnap tried to
convince Feyerabend of the virtues of clarity, but failed. Feyerabend
was still attached to "scientific" philosophy, and
considered philosophy worthless unless it made a positive and
quantifiable contribution to the growth of knowledge (which, of
course, meant science).



But a seminar in Hamburg in 1965, at which Feyerabend discussed the
foundations of quantum theory with the physicist C.F. von
Weizsacker, did have a lasting, if somewhat delayed, impact:



> 
> Von Weizsacker showed how quantum mechanics arose from concrete
> research while I complained, on general methodological grounds, that
> important alternatives had been omitted. The arguments supporting my
> complaint were quite good... but it was suddenly clear to me that
> imposed without regard to circumstances they were a hindrance rather
> than a help: a person trying to solve a problem whether in science or
> elsewhere *must be given complete freedom* and cannot be
> restricted by any demands, norms, however plausible they may seem to
> the logician or the philosopher who has thought them out in the
> privacy of his study. Norms and demands must be checked by research,
> not by appeal to theories of rationality. In a lengthy article I
> explained how Bohr had used this philosophy and how it differs from
> more abstract procedures. Thus Professor von Weizsacker has prime
> responsibility for my change to "anarchism"--though
> he was not at all pleased when I told him so in 1977. (*SFS*,
> p. 117).
> 


### 4.3 The Impact of the "Student Revolution"



The mid-to-late 1960s was a time of ferment in Western culture, and
Feyerabend was in the thick of it. In Berkeley, naturally, he ran into
the Free Speech Movement, and he encountered the "student
revolution" there too, as well as in London and Berlin. This
obviously fired his interest in political philosophy, more especially
in political questions about science. Of his post at Berkeley, he
later said: 



> 
> My function was to carry out the educational policies of the State of
> California which means I had to teach people what a small group of
> white intellectuals had decided was knowledge. (*SFS*, p. 118).
> 



However, Feyerabend's experience under these educational
policies was undoubtedly one of the defining periods of his
intellectual life, a time in which he became deeply suspicious of
these intellectuals and "Western rationalism" as a whole:




> 
> In the years 1964ff. Mexicans, Blacks, Indians entered the university
> as a result of new educational policies. There they sat, partly
> curious, partly disdainful, partly simply confused hoping to get an
> "education". What an opportunity for a prophet in search
> of a following! What an opportunity, my rationalist friends told me,
> to contribute to the spreading of reason and the improvement of
> mankind! I felt very differently. For it dawned on me that the
> intricate arguments and the wonderful stories I had so far told to my
> more or less sophisticated audience might just be dreams, reflections
> of the conceit of a small group who had succeeded in enslaving
> everyone else with their ideas. Who was I to tell these people what
> and how to think? (ibid. See also *KT*, p. 123).
> 



At this time, Feyerabend gave two lectures, one on general philosophy,
and one on philosophy of science. He seems to have got into some
trouble at Berkeley by running his seminar on unacceptably loose
lines, regularly cancelling lectures, and failing to prepare for the
lectures he did give: 



> 
> I often told the students to go home--the official notes would
> contain everything they needed. As a result an audience of 300, 500,
> even 1,200 shrank to 50 or 30. I wasn't happy about that; I
> would have preferred a larger audience, and yet I repeated my advice
> until the administration intervened. Why did I do it? Was it because I
> disliked the examination system, which blurred the line between
> thought and routine? Was it because I despised the idea that knowledge
> was a skill that had to be acquired and stabilized by rigorous
> training? Or was it because I didn't think much of my own
> performance? All these factors may have played a role. (p. 122).
> 



But although he sympathised with the original aims of the student
movement, Feyerabend was unimpressed by their leaders, feeling that
their ideas were as authoritarian as those they were trying to
replace. He reports having cut fewer lectures during the student
strike than either before or afterwards! Nevertheless, by holding his
lectures off-campus during this campus war, Feyerabend antagonised the
administration that had hired him. Tales of him giving "A"
grades to every student in his class, regardless of their production
(or lack of it), abound. He had the impression that some of his
colleagues, especially John Searle, wanted to have him fired, and that
they only gave up when they realised how much paperwork would be
involved (p. 126). 


### 4.4 The Late Sixties



During the summer of 1966, Feyerabend lectured on church dogma at
Berkeley. ("Why church dogma? Because the development of church
dogma shares many features with the development of scientific
thought" (pp. 137-8)). He eventually turned these thoughts
into a paper on "Classical Empiricism", published in 1970,
in which he argued that empiricism shared certain problematic features
with protestantism. He had already come some way from his 1965 defence
of a "disinfected", "tolerant" form of
Empiricism. The publication, in 1969, of the four-page article,
"Science Without Experience", which argued that in
principle experience is necessary at *no* point in the
construction, comprehension or testing of empirical scientific
theories finally gave notice that Feyerabend was no longer concerned
to present himself as any kind of empiricist. 



Despite taking his academic duties and responsibilities decreasingly
seriously, and coming into conflict with his own university's
administration as a result, Feyerabend had not yet fouled his
substantial reputation as a serious philosopher of science. He reports
that he received job offers from London, Berlin, Yale, and Auckland,
that he was invited to become a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,
and that he corresponded with Friedrich von Hayek (whom he already
knew from the Alpbach seminars) about a job in Freiburg (p. 127). He
accepted the posts in London, Berlin, and Yale. In 1968, he resigned
from UC Berkeley and left for Minneapolis, but grew homesick, got
re-appointed, and returned to Berkeley almost immediately.



In London, lecturing to University College and the LSE, he met Imre
Lakatos. The two became great friends, corresponding with one another
regularly and voluminously until Lakatos' death. Feyerabend
recalls that Lakatos, whose office was across the corridor from the
LSE lecture hall, used to intervene in his lectures when Feyerabend
made a point he disagreed with (*SFS*, p. 13, *KT*, p.
128).


## 5. Feyerabend's Later Work: Towards Relativism, but then Beyond It


### 5.1 *Against Method* (1970-75)



After stints in London, Berlin, and Yale (all of them running
alongside his post at UC Berkeley), Feyerabend took up a visiting
professorship at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and lectured
there in 1972 and 1974 (pp. 134-5). He even considered settling
down in New Zealand around that time (p. 153), although this hardly
seems compatible with his jet-setting lifestyle. 



By the early 1970s Feyerabend had flown the falsificationist coop and
was ready to expound his own perspective on scientific method. In
1970, he published a long article entitled "Against
Method" in which he attacked several prominent accounts of
scientific methodology. In their correspondence, he and Lakatos
subsequently planned the construction of a debate volume, to be
entitled *For and Against Method*, in which Lakatos would put
forward the "rationalist" case that there was an
identifiable set of rules of scientific method which make all good
science science, and Feyerabend would attack it. Lakatos'
unexpected death in February 1974, which seems to have shocked
Feyerabend deeply, meant that the rationalist part of the joint work
was never completed.



Later that year, Feyerabend found himself lecturing at the University
of Sussex:



> 
> I have no idea why and how I went to the University of Sussex at
> Brighton... what I do remember is that I taught two terms
> (1974/1975) and then resigned; twelve hours a week (one lecture
> course, the rest tutorials) was too much. (p. 153).
> 



A member of Feyerabend's audience recalls things in rather more
detail:



> 
> Sussex University: the start of the Autumn Term, 1974. There was not a
> seat to be had in the biggest Arts lecture theatre on campus. Taut
> with anticipation, we waited expectantly and impatiently for the
> advertized event to begin. He was not on time--as usual. In fact
> rumour had it that he would not be appearing at all that illness (or
> was it just ennui? or perhaps a mistress?) had confined him to bed.
> But just as we began sadly to reconcile ourselves to the idea that
> there would be no performance that day at all, Paul Feyerabend burst
> through the door at the front of the packed hall. Rather pale, and
> supporting himself on a short metal crutch, he walked with a limp
> across to the blackboard. Removing his sweater he picked up the chalk
> and wrote down three questions one beneath the other: What's so
> great about knowledge? What's so great about science?
> What's so great about truth? We were not going to be
> disappointed after all!
> 
> 
> During the following weeks of that term, and for the rest of his year
> as a visiting lecturer, Feyerabend demolished virtually every
> traditional academic boundary. He held no idea and no person sacred.
> With unprecedented energy and enthusiasm he discussed anything from
> Aristotle to the Azande. How does science differ from witchcraft? Does
> it provide the only rational way of cognitively organizing our
> experience? What should we do if the pursuit of truth cripples our
> intellects and stunts our individuality? Suddenly epistemology became
> an exhilarating area of investigation.
> 
> 
> 
> Feyerabend created spaces in which people could breathe again. He
> demanded of philosophers that they be receptive to ideas from the most
> disparate and apparently far-flung domains, and insisted that only in
> this way could they understand the processes whereby knowledge grows.
> His listeners were enthralled, and he held his huge audiences until,
> too ill and too exhausted to continue, he simply began repeating
> himself. But not before he had brought the house down by writing
> "Aristotle" in three-foot high letters on the blackboard
> and then writing "Popper" in tiny, virtually illegible
> letters beneath it! (Krige 1980, pp. 106-7).
> 
> 
> 



Because his health was poor, Feyerabend started seeing a healer who
had been recommended to him. The treatment was successful, and
thenceforth Feyerabend used to refer to his own case as an example of
both the failures of orthodox medicine and the largely unexplored
possibilities of "alternative" or traditional remedies.




Instead of the volume written jointly with Lakatos, Feyerabend put
together his tour de force, the book version of *Against
Method* (London: New Left Books, 1975), which he sometimes
conceived of as a letter to Lakatos (to whom the book is dedicated). A
more accurate description, however, is the one given in his
autobiography:



> 
> *AM* is not a book, it is a collage. It contains descriptions,
> analyses, arguments that I had published, in almost the same words,
> ten, fifteen, even twenty years earlier... I arranged them in a
> suitable order, added transitions, replaced moderate passages with
> more outrageous ones, and called the result "anarchism". I
> loved to shock people... (pp. 139, 142).
> 



The book contained many of the themes mentioned so far in this essay,
sprinkled into a case study of the transition from geocentric to
heliocentric astronomy. But whereas he had previously been arguing in
favour of methodology (a "pluralistic" methodology, that
is), he had now become dissatisfied with *any* methodology. He
emphasised that older scientific theories, like Aristotle's
theory of motion, had powerful empirical and argumentative support,
and stressed, correlatively, that the heroes of the scientific
revolution, such as Galileo, were not as scrupulous as they were
sometimes represented to be. He portrayed Galileo as making full use
of rhetoric, propaganda, and various epistemological tricks in order
to support the heliocentric position. The Galileo case is crucial for
Feyerabend, since the "scientific revolution" is his
paradigm of scientific progress and of radical conceptual change, and
Galileo is his hero of the scientific revolution. He also sought
further to downgrade the importance of empirical arguments by
suggesting that aesthetic criteria, personal whims and social factors
have a far more decisive role in the history of science than
rationalist or empiricist historiography would indicate. 



*Against Method* explicitly drew the "epistemological
anarchist" conclusion that there are no useful and exceptionless
methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth
of knowledge. The history of science is so complex that if we insist
on a general methodology which will not inhibit progress the only
"rule" it will contain will be the useless suggestion:
"anything goes". In particular, logical empiricist
methodologies and Popper's Critical Rationalism would inhibit
scientific progress by enforcing restrictive conditions on new
theories. The more sophisticated "methodology of scientific
research programmes" developed by Lakatos either contains
ungrounded value-judgements about what constitutes good science, or is
reasonable only because it is epistemological anarchism in disguise.
The phenomenon of incommensurability renders the standards which these
"rationalists" use for comparing theories inapplicable.
The book thus (understandably) had Feyerabend branded an
"irrationalist". At a time when Kuhn was downplaying the
"irrationalist" implications of his own book, Feyerabend
was perceived to be casting himself in the role others already saw as
his for the taking. (He did not, however, commit himself to
*political* anarchism. His political philosophy was a mixture
of liberalism and social democracy).



He later said:



> 
> One of my motives for writing *Against Method* was to free
> people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract
> concepts such as "truth", "reality", or
> "objectivity", which narrow people's vision and ways
> of being in the world. Formulating what I thought were my own attitude
> and convictions, I unfortunately ended up by introducing concepts of
> similar rigidity, such as "democracy",
> "tradition", or "relative truth". Now that I
> am aware of it, I wonder how it happened. The urge to explain
> one's own ideas, not simply, not in a story, but by means of a
> "systematic account", is powerful indeed. (pp.
> 179-80).
> 


### 5.2 The Political Consequences of Epistemological Anarchism: *Science in a Free Society* (1978)



The critical reaction to *Against Method* seems to have taken
Feyerabend by surprise. He was shocked to be accused of being
aggressive and nasty, so he replied by accusing his accusers of the
very same thing. He felt it necessary to respond to most of the
book's major reviews in print, and later assembled these replies
into a section of his next book, *Science in a Free Society*,
entitled "Conversations with Illiterates". Here he berated
the unfortunate reviewers for having misread *Against Method*,
as well as for being constitutionally incapable of distinguishing
between irony, playfulness, argument by reductio ad absurdum, and the
(apparently rather few) things he had really committed himself to in
*AM*. The spectacle of Feyerabend levelling these accusations
at others is not itself without irony. (His widow reports that in his
later years, *SFS* was the book he would most like to have
distanced himself from). In the commotion surrounding *AM*,
Feyerabend succumbed to depression: 



> 
> ... now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my
> private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense. I often
> wished I had never written that fucking book. (*KT*, p. 147).
> 



Feyerabend saw himself as having undermined the arguments for
science's privileged position within culture, and much of his
later work was a critique of the position of science within Western
societies. Because there is no scientific method, we can't
justify science as the best way of acquiring knowledge. And the
*results* of science don't prove its excellence, since
these results have often depended on the presence of non-scientific
elements, science prevails only because "the show has been
rigged in its favour" (*SFS*, p. 102), and other
traditions, despite their achievements, have never been given a
chance. The truth, he suggests, is that 



> 
> science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is
> prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have
> been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is
> conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only
> for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or
> who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and
> its limits (*AM*, p. 295).
> 



The separation of church and state should therefore be supplemented by
the separation of science and state, in order for us to achieve the
humanity we are capable of. Setting up the ideal of a free society as
"a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal
access to the centres of power" (*SFS*, p. 9), Feyerabend
argues that science is a threat to democracy. To defend society
against science we should place science under democratic control and
be intensely sceptical about scientific "experts",
consulting them only if they are controlled democratically by juries
of laypeople.


### 5.3 Ten Wonderful Years: The Eighties in Berkeley and Zurich



Out of all Feyerabend's many academic positions, perhaps the one
he enjoyed most was his tenure throughout the 1980s at the
*Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule*, Zurich. Feyerabend
applied for the post after his friend Eric Jantsch had told him that
the Polytechnic was looking for a philosopher of science. The
selection process was, by Feyerabend's account, very long and
somewhat involved (pp. 154ff.). Having recently left another post in
Kassel, he apparently gave up hopes of being hired by the Swiss, and
"decided to remain in Berkeley and stop moving about" (p.
158). But, after several stages in the decision-making procedure, he
was finally given the job, and "ten wonderful years of
half-Berkeley, half-Switzerland" (p. 158) turned out to be
exactly what he had been looking for. At Zurich he lectured on
Plato's *Theaetetus* and *Timaeus*, and then on
Aristotle's *Physics*. The two-hour seminars, many of
which were organised by Christian Thomas (with whom Feyerabend was to
edit anthologies) were run on the same lines as Berkeley: no set
topic, but presentations by the participants (p. 160). Feyerabend
later considered this to be the period in which he "got his
intellectual act together" (p. 162), meaning that he recovered
from the critical reactions to *Against Method* and was finally
freed from the necessity of defending it against all criticism.
However, this didn't seem to have affected his attitude towards
work: in Zurich he refused offers of an office, because no office
meant no office hours, and therefore no waste of time (pp. 131, 158)!




Many of the more important papers Feyerabend published during the
mid-1980s were collected together in *Farewell to Reason*
(London: Verso, 1987). The major message of this book is that
relativism is the solution to the problems of conflicting beliefs and
of conflicting ways of life. Feyerabend starts by suggesting that the
contemporary intellectual scene in Western culture is by no means as
fragmented and cacophonous as many intellectuals would have us
believe. The surface diversity belies a deeper uniformity, a monotony
generated and sustained by the cultural and ideological imperialism
which the West uses to beat its opponents into submission. Such
uniformity, however, can be shown to be harmful even when judged by
the standards of those who impose it. Cultural diversity, which
already exists in some societies, is a good thing not least because it
affords the best defence against totalitarian domination.



Feyerabend proposes to support the idea of cultural diversity both
positively, by producing considerations in its favour, and negatively
"by criticising philosophies that oppose it"
(*FTR*, p. 5). Contemporary philosophies of the latter type are
said to rest on the notions of *Objectivity* and
*Reason*. He seeks to undermine the former notion by pointing
out that confrontations between cultures with strongly held opinions
which are each believed by members of the cultures in question to be
objectively true can turn out in different ways. The result of such
confrontation may be the persistence of the old views, fruitful and
mutual interaction, relativism, or argumentative evaluation.
"Relativism" here means the decision to treat the other
people's form of life and the beliefs it embodies as
"true-for-them", while treating our own views as
"true-for-us". Feyerabend feels that this is an
appropriate way to *resolve* such confrontation.



Admittedly, these outcomes are indeed possible. But this does not
establish any form of relativism. Indeed, we might as well turn the
argument around, and say that the possibility of the dispute being
resolved by one participant freely coming around to the other's
point of view shows the *un*tenability of relativism.



Feyerabend complains that the ideas of reason and rationality are
"ambiguous and never clearly explained" (*FTR*, p.
10); they are deified hangovers from autocratic times which no longer
have any content but whose "halo of excellence" (ibid.)
clings to them and lends them spurious respectability:



> 
> [R]ationalism has no identifiable content and reason no recognisable
> agenda over and above the principles of the party that happens to have
> appropriated its name. All it does now is to lend class to the general
> drive towards monotony. It is time to disengage Reason from this drive
> and, as it has been thoroughly compromised by the association, to bid
> it farewell. (*FTR*, p. 13).
> 



Relativism is the tool with which Feyerabend hopes to "undermine
the very basis of Reason" (ibid.). But is it Reason with a
capital "R", the philosophers' abstraction alone,
that is to be renounced, or reason itself too? Feyerabend is on weak
ground when he claims that "Reason" is a
philosophers' notion which has no content, for it is precisely
the philosopher who *is* willing to attach a specific content
to the formal notion of rationality (unlike the layperson, whose
notion of reason is closer to what Feyerabend calls the
"material" conception, where to be rational is "to
avoid certain views and to accept others" (ibid., p. 10)). 



Relativism is a result of cultural confrontation, an "attempt to
make sense of the phenomenon of cultural variety" (*FTR*,
p. 19). Feyerabend is well aware that the term
"relativism" itself is understood in many different ways.
But his attempt to occupy a substantial yet defensible relativist
position is a failure. At some points he merely endorses views which
no-one would deny, but which do not deserve to be called relativist
(such as the idea that people may profit from studying other points of
view, no matter how strongly they hold their own view (*FTR*,
p. 20)). At others he does manage to subscribe to a genuinely
relativist view, but fails to show why it must be accepted.



It was only in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of Austria's
unification with Germany, that Feyerabend became interested in his
past (p. 1). The Feyerabends left California for life in Switzerland
and Italy in the fall of 1989 (p. 2). It was during this move that
Feyerabend re-discovered his mother's suicide note (p. 9), which
may have been one of the factors that spurred him to write his
autobiography. Feyerabend looked forward to his retirement, and he and
Grazia decided to try to have children. He claimed to have forgotten
the thirty-five years of his academic career almost as quickly as he
had earlier forgotten his military service (p. 168).


### 5.4 Feyerabend in the Nineties



In the early 1990s, Feyerabend worked up a course of lectures he had
previously given in Berkeley into a series of five lectures entitled
'What is knowledge? What is science?'. These were
originally delivered to a general audience, but later edited and
published by Eric Oberheim as a book entitled *The Tyranny of
Science* [Feyerabend 2011]. 



The main themes of the book are as follows. Scientists and
philosophers sometimes present science as a unified worldview, a
monolith (or a monster, depending on one's preferences). It is
not. Science is both incomplete and quite strongly disunified. It does
not speak with a single voice, therefore appeals to the abstraction
'Science' are out of place. The ideology known as
objectivism, or scientific materialism, which takes science to be our
ultimate measure of what exists, is therefore ungrounded. Its
defenders, who portray themselves as the defenders of Reason, are
often the kind of intellectual imperialists whose attitudes and advice
in the past led, or would have led, to the destruction of first-nation
communities. 



Other equally popular philosophical claims about science are also
flawed. The idea that science is successful needs interrogation.
Science does have some successes, but these can be detached from the
ideology that seems to support them. The idea that science starts from
facts, and eschews theories until the facts are gathered, is a myth.
The same can be said of the idea that science is value-free, and also
of the idea that scientific results are relevant to urgent social
problems. 



One aspect of the disunity of science is that 'scientists'
should not mean merely theoreticians: science also (and essentially)
features experimentalists. In their work the importance of hands-on
experience, and of what Michael Polanyi called 'tacit
knowledge', is most obvious. But in fact these sorts of
experience and knowledge play an important role throughout the
sciences, even in their most obviously theoretical parts. The
Platonic-rationalist picture of science as pure thinking about the
nature of reality is a distortion.



Perhaps the book's central complaint is that a particular
abstract, theoretical, 'objectivist' kind of science,
together with an associated kind of thinking about science, now
dominate our thinking, excluding more human modes of thought.
Scientism, the belief that science has the answer to all meaningful
questions, is also a target. Feyerabend's typical strategy is to
take some hallowed idea (e.g., that the success of science is due to
observation and experiment), and ask: how did it arise? Tracing its
ancestry back to ancient Greek thinkers (usually Plato, Parmenides, or
Xenophanes), he assesses their arguments for it, and finds them
eminently resistible. His complaint is not that their arguments are
invalid, though--that would be already to take on a
quasi-scientific mode of assessment. Instead, Feyerabend makes it
clear that he prefers 'stories' (or even
'fairytales') to arguments, and that rival stories are to
be assessed in terms of how interesting, appealing, or revealing they
are. The sorts of stories the ancient Greek tragedians told, being
more obviously human, fare better on such measures than those of the
ancient Greek philosophers, so we should not assume that philosophers
are our best guides in such matters. 



Feyerabend also published a surprisingly large number of papers in the
1990s (although many of them were short ones with overlapping
content). Several appeared in a new journal, *Common
Knowledge*, in whose inauguration he had a hand, and which set out
to integrate insights from all parts of the intellectual landscape.




Although these papers were on scattered subjects, there are some
strong themes running through them, several of which bear comparison
with what gets called "post-modernism" (see Preston 1998).
Here I shall sketch only the main ones.



One of the projects which Feyerabend worked on for a long time, but
never really brought to completion, went under the name "The
Rise of Western Rationalism". Under this umbrella he hoped to
show that Reason (with a capital "R") and Science had
displaced the binding principles of previous world-views *not*
as the result of having won an argument, but as the result of
power-play. While the first philosophers (the pre-Socratic thinkers)
had interesting views, their attempt to replace, streamline or
rationalise the folk-wisdom which surrounded them was eminently
resistible. Their introduction of the appearance/reality dichotomy
made nonsense of many of the things people had previously known. Even
nowadays, indigenous cultures and counter-cultural practices provide
alternatives to Reason and that nasty Western science.



However, Feyerabend sometimes also recognised that this is to present
science as too much of a monolith. In most of his work after
*Against Method*, he emphasises what has come to be known as
the "disunity of science". Science, he insists, is a
collage, not a system or a unified project. Not only does it include
plenty of components derived from distinctly
"non-scientific" disciplines, but these components are
often vital parts of the "progress" science has made
(using whatever criterion of progress you prefer). Science is a
collection of theories, practices, research traditions and world-views
whose range of application is not well-determined and whose merits
vary to a great extent. All this can be summed up in his slogan:
"Science is not one thing, it is many."



Likewise, the supposed ontological correlate of science, "the
world", consists not only of one kind of thing but of countless
kinds of things, things which cannot be "reduced" to one
another. In fact, there is no good reason to suppose that the world
has a single, determinate nature. Rather we inquirers construct the
world in the course of our inquiries, and the plurality of our
inquiries ensures that the world itself has a deeply plural quality:
the Homeric gods and the microphysicist's subatomic particles
are simply different ways in which "Being" responds to
(different kinds of) inquiry. How the world is "in-itself"
is for ever unknowable. In this respect, Feyerabend's last work
can be thought of as aligned with "social
constructivism".


## 6. Conclusion: Last Things



Feyerabend's autobiography occupied him right up until his death
on February 11th, 1994, at the Genolier Clinic, overlooking Lake
Geneva. At the end of the book, he expressed the wish that what should
remain of him would be "*not* papers, *not* final
declarations, but love" (p. 181).



His autobiography was published in 1995, a third volume of his
*Philosophical Papers* appeared in 1999, and his last book
*The Conquest of Abundance*, edited by Bert Terpstra, appeared
in the same year. A volume of his papers on the philosophy of quantum
mechanics is currently being prepared, under the editorship of Stefano
Gattei and Joseph Agassi. 



Although the focus of philosophy of science has moved away from
interest in scientific methodology in recent years, this is not due in
any great measure to acceptance of Feyerabend's
anti-methodological argument. His critique of science (which gave him
the reputation for being an "anti-science philosopher",
"the worst enemy of science", etc.) is patchy. Some of its
flaws stem directly from his scientific realism. It sets up a straight
confrontation between science and other belief-systems as if they are
all aiming to do the *same* thing (give us "knowledge of
the world") and must be compared for how well they deliver the
goods. A better approach would be, in Gilbert Ryle's words,
"to draw uncompromising contrasts" between the businesses
of science and those of other belief-systems. Such an approach fits
far better with the theme Feyerabend approached later in his life:
that of the disunity of science.



Feyerabend came to be seen as a leading cultural relativist, not just
because he stressed that some theories are incommensurable, but also
because he defended relativism in politics as well as in epistemology.
His denunciations of aggressive Western imperialism, his critique of
science itself, his conclusion that "objectively" there
may be nothing to choose between the claims of science and those of
astrology, voodoo, and alternative medicine, as well as his concern
for environmental issues ensured that he was a hero of the
anti-technological counter-culture.



Different components and phases of Feyerabend's work have
influenced very different groups of thinkers. His early scientific
realism, contextual theory of meaning, and the way he proposed to
defend materialism were taken up by Paul and Patricia Churchland.
Richard Rorty, for a time, also endorsed eliminative materialism.
Feyerabend's critique of reductionism has influenced
philosophers of science such as Cliff Hooker, Bas van Fraassen, and
John Dupre, and his general point of view influenced books such
as Alan Chalmers' well-known introduction to philosophy of
science *What Is This Thing Called Science?* (1978).



Feyerabend has also had considerable influence within the social
studies. He directly inspired books like D.L. Phillips'
*Abandoning Method* (1973), in which the attempt was made to
transcend methodology. Less directly, he has exerted enormous
influence on a generation of sociologists of science through his
relativism, social constructivism, and apparent irrationalism. It is
still far too early to say whether, and in what way, his philosophy
will be remembered.