Paul Feyerabend argued science has no single method, and packed lecture halls
In Against Method, published in 1975, Paul Feyerabend claimed there are no universally valid rules for doing science. The provocation made him one of the most talked-about philosophers of the twentieth century. Ian Hacking's obituary summed him up as a humanist who belonged to both arts and sciences, adding that he was also fun.
Born in Vienna in 1924, Feyerabend grew up in a working-class street full of street musicians, quarrelling relatives and illusionists, and later recalled a childhood where magic lay just a shift of perspective away from the everyday, a theme that resurfaced in his philosophy. A top pupil in physics and mathematics, he built a telescope with his father at 13 and went on to make observations for a Swiss solar research institute. He also began a lifelong love of singing and opera.
His parents welcomed the Anschluss, and his father joined the Nazi Party. Feyerabend, compelled into the Hitler Youth, later admitted with unusual candour that he saw the occupation and war mostly as nuisances that interrupted his reading and stargazing. Drafted in 1942, he became an officer on the northern Eastern Front, won the Iron Cross and reached lieutenant. During the retreat he was shot three times while directing traffic; a bullet in the spine kept him in a wheelchair for a year and left him partly paralysed and in intermittent pain for life.
After the war he switched his Vienna doctorate from history and sociology to physics, organised the Kraft Circle discussion group, and in 1948 met Karl Popper, who impressed him. Through Elizabeth Anscombe he met Wittgenstein, and in his travels he talked with Niels Bohr. He lectured at Bristol from 1955, then taught at Berkeley for three decades, with stints at ETH Zurich and elsewhere.
A 2010 poll placed him eighth among philosophers of science. He is grouped with Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos in the historical turn of the field, and his scientific pluralism shaped the Stanford School. Later books such as Science in a Free Society and Farewell to Reason pushed into politics and ethics. He finished his autobiography, Killing Time, on his deathbed in 1994. A foundation supporting disadvantaged communities and an asteroid bear his name.
Source: Paul Feyerabend
