Selected Recreations

Things that make life worth living... .

Eclected by Damien Laker.

Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend did much to shape the philosophy of science, with his slogan of epistemological anarchism.

However, his autobiography (Killing Time: the Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, is also a very moving insight into a brilliant and troubled individual.  Writing of his early childhood in Vienna, he says:

I often accompanied my mother to the hairdresser.  "What do you want to do when you grow up?", asked the ladies.  "I want to retire," I replied.  There was reason in my reply.  Building sandcastles in the park I saw nervous men with briefcases running after crowded streetcars.  "What are those people doing?" I asked mama.  "They're going to work," she said.  I also saw an elderly gentleman, sitting quietly on a bench, enjoying the sun.  "Why is he here?" I asked.  "He is retired."  Well, after that, retirement looked very attractive indeed. (p. 15)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice entry on Paul Feyerabend:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/

It says that when Feyerabend was teaching at ETH in Zurich, "he refused offers of an office, because no office meant no office hours, and therefore no waste of time!"

Feyerabend was born in Vienna in 1924.  He received an Iron Cross for his service in the German army in World War 2.  On one occasion, he was hit by three bullets (first in the face, then in the hand, then the spine).  As a result of his wounds, he endured ill health for the rest of his life. 

Famously, he reported that he received benefits from alternative healing practitioners that he had been unable to obtain from western medicine.  In his major book, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London, 1975), he piled ridicule on western medicine.  A memorable swipe is: "This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society".

In return, many reviewers piled ridicule on Feyerabend.  The tone of this exchange is illustrated by Feyerabend's response to a review that appeared in the New York Review of Books (See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7668).  Feyerabend opens his note to the editors thus: "I think you owe me a review. Not a perceptive, penetrating, sparkling review—that might be difficult to come by—just a plain old review that says what is in a book and how good it is".

While Against Method energised the philosophy of science, the savage response to the book took a great emotional toll on Feyerabend.  In Killing Time, he writes: "… now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense.  I often wished I had never written that fucking book". (p. 147)

Feyerabend's next book (Science in a Free Society, London: New Left Books, 1978) dealt with much of the controversy generated by Against Method.  In the section "Conversations with Illiterates", he dealt with reviews of Against Method.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says "Here he berated the unfortunate reviewers for having misread Against Method, as well as for being constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between irony, playfulness, argument by reductio ad absurdum, and the (apparently rather few) things he had really committed himself to in Against Method."  Feyerabend had abundant justification for being upset at the dull-minded criticisms and ad hominem attacks that he had been forced to endure.

While teaching at UC Berkeley, Feyerabend used unconventional methods:

"I often told the students to go home—the official notes would contain everything they needed. As a result an audience of 300, 500, even 1,200 shrank to 50 or 30. I wasn't happy about that; I would have preferred a larger audience, and yet I repeated my advice until the administration intervened. Why did I do it? Was it because I disliked the examination system, which blurred the line between thought and routine? Was it because I despised the idea that knowledge was a skill that had to be acquired and stabilized by rigorous training? Or was it because I didn't think much of my own performance? All these factors may have played a role." (Killing Time, p. 122)

Feyerabend also writes in Killing Time that his belief was that some of his colleagues at UC Berkeley were trying to get rid of him, and only gave up when they realised how much paperwork would be involved.

Lee Smolin provides an anecdote about Feyerabend in is book The Trouble with Physics:

"To thank him for saving my career, I sent a copy of my PhD thesis to Feyerabend. In reply, he sent me his new book, Science in a Free Society, with a note inviting me to look him up if I was ever in Berkeley. A few months later, I happened to be in California for a particle-physics conference and tried to track him down, but it was quite a project. He kept no office hours at the university and, indeed, no office. The Philosophy Department secretary laughed when I asked for him and advised me to try him at home. There he was in the phone book, on Miller Avenue in the Berkeley hills. I summoned up my courage, dialled, and politely asked for Professor Paul Feyerabend. Whoever was on the other end shouted "Professor Paul Feyerabend! That's the other Paul Feyerabend. You can find him at the university" and hung up. So I dropped in on one of his classes, and found him happy to talk afterward, if only briefly. But in the few minutes he gave me, he offered an invaluable piece of advice. "Yes, the academic world is screwed up, and there's nothing you can do about it. But don't worry about that. Just do what you want. If you know what you want to do and advocate for it, no one will put any energy into stopping you."

Feyerabend was killed in Geneva on February 11th 1994, by an inoperable brain tumour. As Broughton et al. report on the University of California web site: "With characteristic aplomb he insisted, shortly before his death, that a Catholic mass of burial be said at his funeral, but only by a defrocked priest. And this is how he was, in fact, buried."

Send mail to webmaster@compoundinghappens.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2005-2008 CompoundingHappens.com
Last modified: Friday, 25. July 2008