Paul Feyerabend

Paul Karl Feyerabend (Vienna, 1924 – Genolier, 1994) was an Austrian philosopher of science, best known for his epistemological anarchism and his claim that no universal method governs scientific progress. He worked in the debate that reshaped the philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century, alongside figures such as Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, and he remains a difficult reference for anyone who believes in a fixed scientific rationality.

Born into a middle-class family in Vienna, Feyerabend did well at school, especially in physics and mathematics, and developed a taste for theatre and singing. His youth was shaped by the Anschluss of 1938 and the Second World War. He was conscripted into the German labour service and later served as an officer on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded and needed a cane for the rest of his life. After the war he studied in Vienna, first history and sociology, then physics, and joined the circle led by Victor Kraft.

His philosophical training took shape in the 1940s and 1950s. At the Alpbach Forum he met Karl Popper, and later worked with him at the London School of Economics. He initially accepted falsificationism but soon moved away from it. In 1955 he took his first academic post at Bristol, and in 1958 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades. He published Problems of Empiricism in 1965 and, most importantly, Against Method in 1975. The book made his name, but its early reception, as he recalled in his autobiography, plunged him into deep depression.

In Against Method he argues that the history of science does not fit any fixed methodological rule, and that many important advances came precisely from breaking the rules of the day. He was not defending irrationality; he wanted to show that science is a historical and social enterprise rather than a mechanical procedure. He also defended the incommensurability of rival theories and rejected any privileged status for science over other forms of knowledge. In Science in a Free Society (1978) he carried these ideas into politics, and in later works such as Farewell to Reason he explored art, culture and religion.

His influence is felt in the sociology of scientific knowledge and in the historical turn of the philosophy of science. He was a much-attended lecturer and a writer with a clear, lively style, far from academic stiffness. He died in 1994, having completed his autobiography, Killing Time. He is remembered today as one of the most provocative thinkers of the twentieth century, and his distrust of universal rules continues to fuel debate.