Paul Feyerabend: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Paul Karl Feyerabend was born on January 13, 1924, in Vienna, the capital of the young Austrian republic that had emerged from the collapse of the Habsburg empire. His father was a civil servant, and the family was not wealthy; Feyerabend's childhood was marked by the political turmoil of interwar Vienna, and his education was interrupted by the rise of the Nazi regime. After the Anschluss of 1938, he was conscripted into the German war effort, and in 1942 he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst and then the Wehrmacht. While serving on the Eastern Front in 1943 he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery; in 1945, during the final collapse, he was shot in the hand and spine and left partially paralyzed for life. He would later describe the experience of the war as the source of his lifelong distrust of authority and his insistence that individuals must think for themselves.

After the war Feyerabend studied at the University of Vienna, where he encountered the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle's heirs and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose ideas were circulating in Austrian intellectual life. He also trained as an actor and singer — an experience that shaped his famously theatrical lecturing style — before devoting himself to philosophy and physics. In 1951 he went to England on a British Council scholarship to study with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, where he worked at the center of the most influential philosophy of science in the English-speaking world.

Feyerabend's academic career took him to the University of Bristol, the University of California at Berkeley (from 1958), and later to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with visiting positions across Europe and the Americas. At Berkeley he was a legendary teacher, holding his seminars in cafés and refusing the conventions of academic discipline. He died on February 11, 1994, at a clinic in Geneva, of a brain tumor. His last book, Killing Time (1995), an autobiography published after his death, is as unsentimental and provocative as everything else he wrote.

Historical Context

Feyerabend's thought developed in the golden age of the philosophy of science, the quarter century after the Second World War in which the English-speaking world debated the nature of scientific method with unprecedented intensity. Popper had proposed that science progresses by conjecture and refutation: a theory is scientific if it can be falsified, and science advances by proposing bold hypotheses and ruthlessly testing them. The logical empiricists had proposed that scientific knowledge is built by induction from observation, structured by confirmation. Both schools assumed that there is a method — a set of rules that distinguishes science from non-science and that explains scientific progress. Feyerabend's entire career is a war against this assumption.

The decisive event was the appearance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which argued that science does not proceed by cumulative methodical progress but by discontinuous paradigm shifts, and that the choice between paradigms is not fully rational by any neutral standard. Feyerabend was at once Kuhn's ally and his rival. He agreed that the history of science refutes the picture of cumulative methodical progress, but he rejected Kuhn's alternative — the idea of "normal science" as puzzle-solving under a shared paradigm — as a conformist sociology that failed to capture the anarchic, creative character of actual scientific work. Where Kuhn saw science as a community governed by paradigms, Feyerabend saw it as a battlefield of incommensurable theories, methods, and worldviews.

Core Ideas

The Critique of Method

The central thesis of Against Method (1975) is that there is no universal method of science. Feyerabend surveys the history of science — Galileo's defense of heliocentrism is the paradigm case — and shows that the great scientists succeeded precisely by breaking the methodological rules of their day. Galileo appealed to the telescope, whose reliability was itself contested; he advanced a theory that contradicted the best available evidence; he used persuasion, rhetoric, and even trickery. The conclusion Feyerabend draws is that "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes." The slogan is not a prescription — Feyerabend was not recommending that scientists behave randomly — but a description: the history of science shows that no rule of method has been followed by all successful scientists at all times, and that progress has depended on the freedom to break whatever rules happen to be reigning.

Incommensurability

Feyerabend developed the concept of incommensurability to explain why paradigm change cannot be a matter of comparing theories by a neutral standard. Two theories are incommensurable when their key concepts cannot be translated into a common language: the terms of one theory are so entangled with its other commitments that the other theory cannot even formulate them without distortion. When Galileo's physics replaces Aristotle's, it is not simply that one set of equations wins over another; the very concepts of motion, space, and place change meaning. Incommensurability does not make comparison impossible — Feyerabend was not an irrationalist in the sense of denying that choices can be made — but it makes comparison local, contextual, and irreducibly historical.

Theoretical Pluralism

Against the Popperian demand that science should eliminate competing theories as quickly as possible, Feyerabend argued for theoretical pluralism: science should cultivate many alternative theories simultaneously, because the empirical content of a theory is revealed only through contrast with alternatives. A theory's "facts" are not given in advance; they are articulated in confrontation with rival frameworks. Pluralism is not only intellectually superior but morally and politically superior: it protects the individual against the tyranny of a single orthodoxy, whether that orthodoxy is a scientific paradigm or a political ideology.

The Critique of Scientism

In his later work, especially Science in a Free Society (1978), Feyerabend extended the critique of method into a critique of the social authority of science. Science, he argued, is one tradition among many — a powerful and valuable one, but not the only road to knowledge. The modern state, however, treats science as the arbiter of all knowledge: it funds science, regulates everything else, and conscripts children into a scientific worldview through compulsory education. This, Feyerabend argued, is a form of ideological domination. In a free society, science should have the same status as other traditions — no more, no less — and individuals and communities should be free to choose the traditions by which they live, from Western medicine to traditional healing, from scientific cosmology to religious myth.

Philosophy

Feyerabend's philosophy is a defense of the individual against every system that claims to know better — the system of method, the system of science, the system of the state. His epistemology is an anarchism in the etymological sense: no rule rules. But the anarchism is not a nihilism: Feyerabend did not deny that knowledge is possible or that science is valuable. He denied that knowledge is guaranteed by a method and that science has a monopoly on knowledge. His deepest conviction, formed in the catastrophe of the war and confirmed by a lifetime of studying the history of science, is that human beings think best when they are free — and that every attempt to bind thought to a method, a paradigm, or an authority is not only a political crime but an intellectual error, because the history of inquiry shows that the great advances came from breaking the rules.

This is why Feyerabend is best understood not as an enemy of science but as its most radical friend: he wanted to protect the creativity of science from the philosophers who would regulate it, and to protect the freedom of individuals from the scientists who would rule them. His famous self-description — "I am a philosopher of science, but I am against the philosophy of science" — captures the paradox: the love of inquiry and the hatred of its institutionalization.

Major Works

Feyerabend's major works include Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method (1981) and Problems of Empiricism (1981), the two volumes of his collected philosophical papers, Farewell to Reason (1987), and Three Dialogues on Knowledge (1991). Against Method went through three editions, the third (1993) containing a substantial postscript replying to his critics. His autobiography Killing Time was published posthumously in 1995.

Famous Quotes

The most famous of Feyerabend's formulations is the slogan from Against Method: "The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes." Equally characteristic is his remark that "the history of science is not the history of a method, but the history of the violation of method." His defense of pluralism is condensed in the claim from Science in a Free Society that "science is just one of the many instruments that people have invented to cope with their environment; it is not the only one, and it is not necessarily the best." And his last word on the subject, from Farewell to Reason, is a fitting epitaph: "Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress."

Related Thinkers

Feyerabend's philosophy of science was formed in dialogue with Karl Popper, his teacher at the London School of Economics, whose falsificationism he both extended and subverted. His relation to Thomas Kuhn was one of the defining exchanges of the field: they shared the insight that science does not proceed by methodical accumulation, and they disagreed about everything else. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein, with his insistence that meaning is use and that language games are plural, is a constant background presence in Feyerabend's critique of the unity of method. And his insistence that science is one tradition among many connects his epistemology to the wider questions of knowledge, truth, and skepticism that run through the philosophical tradition.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Paul Feyerabend" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend)
• Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: New Left Books, 1975.
• Feyerabend, Paul. Science in a Free Society. London: New Left Books, 1978.
• Feyerabend, Paul. Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.