Feyerabend, Paul Karl

(b. 13 January 1924 in Vienna, Austria; d. 11 February 1994 in Genolier, Switzerland), philosopher best known for the “epistemological anarchism” of his book Against Method (1975).

Feyerabend was the only child of Rosa Witz, a seamstress, and Paul Feyerabend, a civil servant. Drafted at the age of sixteen, he served in the German army until 1945, when he was wounded while retreating from the Russian Army on the Eastern Front. As a result of this injury he suffered from chronic pain and walked with crutches or a stick for the rest of his life. In 1947 after studying singing and theater at the music academy in Weimar, Germany, he returned to Vienna and entered the university, studying history and physics. He became secretary of the Austrian College Society in Alpbach in 1948, attending summer seminars on the arts, sciences, and philosophy and quickly winning admission to the philosopher Karl Popper’s inner circle. Feyerabend received his Ph.D. in 1951 with a dissertation on observation statements supervised by Victor Kraft. The following year he moved to London and studied with Popper after his first choice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, died before he arrived. He returned to Vienna in 1953 and acted as Arthur Pap’s research assistant before taking up a position as lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol, England, in 1955.

An academic nomad, Feyerabend held positions at many universities, often concurrently. After moving to the United States in 1958 and visiting for a year at the University of California, Berkeley, he was hired with tenure in 1959 (the year he was naturalized), became associate professor in 1962, and taught there intermittently until resigning in 1990. The Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science gave him a fellowship three times between 1957 and 1961. Between 1965 and 1975 he lectured at the University of Hamburg, University College of London, the Free University of Berlin, Yale University, the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and the University of Sussex at Brighton, England. Some of these positions were tenured, but none lasted more than three years. Beginning in 1980 Feyerabend divided his time between Berkeley and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, from which he was pensioned in 1991 due to age limits. He received the Austrian President’s Award for science and fine arts in 1952 and Italy’s Premio Fregene in 1990.

The bullet that lodged in his spine during World War II left Feyerabend impotent, but he nonetheless married four times, including Edultrud (married in 1948, divorced in 1949) and Mary O’Neill (married in 1956, divorced in 1958), and Barbara (married 1970, died 1972). He married his fourth wife Grazia Borrini on 10 January 1989 and with her seemed finally to achieve the intimacy and happiness that had eluded him throughout his life. Feyerabend died of an inoperable brain tumor on 11 February 1994 and was buried at the family gravesite in the Sud-West Friedhof of Vienna.

The controversy around Feyerabend surfaced in the wake of his 1962 essay “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism,” which illustrated criticisms of the dominant philosophy of science with colorful historical portraits of key scientific advances. In the mid-1960s encounters with colleagues, especially Imre Lakatos, and student radicals stimulated Feyerabend to explore the relations between science and democracy, which he described provocatively in Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, first published in essay form in 1970. There and elsewhere, Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church provided a central example of the irreducible complexity of scientific change. Responding to his critics, Feyerabend defended political relativism in Science in a Free Society (1978) and Farewell to Reason (1987). He finished his autobiography, Killing Time (1995), weeks before his death, and left a nearly complete manuscript, now published as The Conquest of Abundance (1999).

Feyerabend criticized “rationalist” accounts of science, which he thought were intended to elevate science above other forms of knowledge. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s logical empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel had distinguished science from metaphysics by arguing that even abstract theoretical terms (such as “atom”) could be interpreted observationally, and that theory choice depends only on experience. In “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism,” Feyerabend turned this view on its head. He argued that since the meanings of observation terms depend on theory and may differ from one theory to the next, experience is not a neutral medium for deciding between theories. Interestingly, he and his Berkeley colleague Thomas Kuhn claimed independently that competing theories may be “incommensurable”: differences between their observation terms may preclude direct comparison. Many philosophical critics took this point to be indefensible or incoherent.

“Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism” also reflects the influence of Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, which Feyerabend later rejected. Reflecting on the relation between theory and observation, Popper distinguished science from metaphysics on two grounds: insistence on testable theories and rejection of theories that fail experimental tests. By 1970 Feyerabend was arguing that even theories that fail such tests should be developed, since the new methodological rules they embody may ultimately prove useful. Thus, in the sense that progress may depend on breaking rules, he wrote in Against Method that “science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise” and that “both an examination of historical episodes and an abstract analysis of the relation between idea and action show that the only principle that does not inhibit human progress is the principle: anything goes.”

Feyerabend’s later works developed the political consequences of theoretical pluralism. In the absence of distinguishing criteria of the kind sought by rationalism, science falls into place as one tradition among many. From the standpoint of other traditions, its accomplishments may or may not seem worthwhile. Thus Feyerabend defended the right of the minority students entering Berkeley in the mid-1960s to make up their own minds about the cultural value of science and to develop alternative worldviews. More generally, even in later writings where he moved away from relativism, he hoped to challenge the unquestioned authority of the sciences over the opinions, values, and lifestyles of ordinary people.

This iconoclastic stance made Feyerabend unpopular with many scientists, but those who dubbed him “the worst enemy of science” failed to grasp his commitment to encouraging creativity in science. By the same token, the historians and sociologists of science who happily appealed to his relativism underestimated the attraction realism held for him. His early scientific realism, pluralist critique of rationalism, and historical writings all helped revitalize the philosophy of science, despite the trenchant criticisms of the notion of incommensurability. Both with philosophers who declare the disunity of the sciences, and with general readers who value the complexity and ambiguity of history above abstractions such as “truth,” “reality,” and “objectivity,” Feyerabend’s influence remains strong.

Cambridge University Press published Feyerabend’s philosophical papers (vols. 1-2, 1981; vol. 3, 1999). His unpublished works are housed at the University of Konstanz, with microfilms at the University of Pittsburgh. For information about Feyerabend’s life and career, see his autobiography Killing Time (1995). The lengthy introduction in Frederick Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories (1977), puts Feyerabend’s views in the context of mid-century philosophy of science. John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society (1997), provides a unified introduction to Feyerabend’s central preoccupations. For a range of perspectives, see John Preston, Gonzalo Munevar, and David Lamb, eds., The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend (2000). Articles in the scientific press include William J. Broad, “Paul Feyerabend: Science and the Anarchist,” Science (2 Nov. 1979); and John Horgan, “Profile: Paul Karl Feyerabend: The Worst Enemy of Science,” Scientific American (May 1993), which uses the “worst enemy” trope ironically. Ian Hacking, “Paul Feyerabend, Humanist,” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (spring 1994), is a moving tribute by a preeminent philosopher. An obituary is in the New York Times (8 Mar. 1994).

David S. Bullwinkle