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Born
Paul Feyerabend was born in Vienna to a middle class family. -
Early Life
It is said that he was a strange child that was practically cut off from the outside world. At the age of six he enrolled in school and had a hard time adjusting and was often sick. That all changed, once he learned to read. Once in high school he was considered a Vorzugsschüler, which is an above average student (Preston, 1997). -
The Anschluss
Forced annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. -
The War (1939-1945)
Feyerabend was drafted into the Arbeitsdienst, which was the work service created by the Nazis. He received the Iron Cross for leading his men into battle and received numerous promotions during his service time. In 1945 he was shot, with the bullet lodged in his spine and soon Nazi Germany surrendered (Preston, 1997). -
" A Raving Positivist"
Paul Feyerabend goes back home to Vienna to study history and sociology and soon changed to the study of physics. He publish his first article " A Raving Positivist". This was when Feyerabend started to dive into philosophy. This is where he took the radical positivist line that science is the basis if knowledge; that it is empirical; and that nonempirical enterprises are either logic or nonsense. This is the time when Feyerabend met Karl Popper. -
First Full-Time academic appointment.
Feyerabend became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol, England. -
An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience”and “Complementarity”
These were two of his most important early works. He was partaking in visiting lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley. He argued against positivism and in favor of a scientific realist account of the relation between theory and experience (Preston, 1997). In these thesis he reversed the direction of interpretation which positivists had presupposed. -
“Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism”
I would say this where Feyerabend started to really show his anarchist views in science. In this work, he criticized empiricist accounts of explanation and theoretical reduction. This is the paper that he introduced incommensurability, and this concept precluded accounts of reduction of confirmation (Preston, 1997) -
Feyerabend's later works
Feyerabend was a visiting lecturer in many different locations all over the world. it was in 1970 that he had his own perspective on the scientific method and was ready to show the world. In his " Against Method" he debated with Lakatos on the rationalist cast that there was a set of rules of the scientific method which makes all good science, science. Feyerabend would often attack Lakatos and this resulted in a debate volume to be entitled "For and Against Method" (Preston, 1997). -
Consequences of Epistemological Anarchism
After receiving notorious amounts of criticism on his book "Against Method', Feyerabend thought it was best to write a following book defending AM. The book was called Science in a Free Society entitled " Conversations with Illiterates". -
Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science: Paul Feyerabend
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Last Years
Paul Feyerabend spent his last years, lecturing at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich. This was just what he needed, to regain his intellectual act after the heavy criticism of "Against Method". He published a few more papers in a collection called " Farewell to Reason", this message of this book was that "relativism is the solution to the problems of conflicting beliefs and of conflicting ways of life" ( Preston, 1997). -
Death (February 11, 1994)
Paul Feyerabend died February 11, 1994 at the Genolier Clinic. His autobiography was published 1995 and a third volume of his Philosophical Papers published in 1999.
