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Birth and Early Life
Feyerabend was born in Vienna, Austria on January 13, 1924. It was there that he attended primary and high school. -
Wartime
After graduating from high school in April 1942 he was drafted into the German Arbeitsdienst. He described the work he did during this period as monotonous: "we moved around in the countryside, dug ditches, and filled them up again." -
Lifelong Wounds
In December 1943, upon completion of officer school in the army, he served as a Lieutenant on the northern part of the Eastern Front in WWII. When the German army started its retreat from the advancing Red Army, Feyerabend was hit by three bullets while directing traffic with one hitting him in the spine. As a consequence, he walked with a stick for the rest of his life and frequently experienced severe pain. He spent the rest of the war recovering from his wounds. -
Returning Home
After the war, Paul decided to return to Vienna to study history and sociology at Weimar Academy. However, he becomes dissatisfied with those subject matters and turns his attention to physics. It was then where he met Felix Ehrenhaft, a physicist whose experiments would influence his later views on the nature of science. -
Alpbach and Popper
In 1948 he visited the first Alpbach Forum in Alpbach, Austria. There Feyerabend first met Karl Popper, who had both a "positive" (early Popper), as well as "negative" (later Popper) effect on him. -
Completion of Doctorate
In 1951, Feyerabend completed his doctoral dissertation. At this time, he was highly influenced by the logical positivism movement. His first papers, published in 1955, are influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Philosophical Investigations. -
University of Bristol
Feyerabend received his first academic appointment at the University of Bristol, where he gave lectures about the philosophy of science. Later in his life, he worked as a professor at several universities including Berkeley, Sussex, and Yale. -
Feyerabend's Views on Science
Over the years, he developed a critical view of science, which he later described as 'anarchistic' to illustrate his rejection of the peremptory use of rules. His position on this topic was radical because it implied that philosophical guidelines should be ignored by scientists, if they are to aim for progress. -
Against Method
In 1975, Feyerabend published his first book, Against Method. It was in this work that he introduced the idea that there was no such thing as “the scientific method". He defended the idea that there are no methodological rules which are always used by scientists. -
Feyerabend's Views on Science cont.
Feyerabend proclaimed himself to be an “epistemological anarchist”- someone who does not believe in a single “scientific method" because to make it singular would limit the activities of scientists, and hence restrict scientific progress.
https://youtu.be/6QgRFxr4tu8
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Lake Geneva
After his retirement in 1991, Feyerabend continued to publish frequent papers and worked on his autobiography. After living a very interesting life, he died from a brain tumor in 1994 at the Genolier Clinic, overlooking Lake Geneva, Switzerland. -
List of Works
Against Method, London: Verso, 1975.
Science in a Free Society, London: New Left Books, 1978.
Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method (Philosophical Papers, Volume 1), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.