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A quick overview of Paul Feyerabend
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Birth and Early Years
Paul Feyerabend is born in Vienna, Austria to a civil servant and a seamstress. He remains mostly sheltered from neighbors and the outside world as "the world is a dangerous place". When he began school at the age of six, he was perplexed with the ways in which he was meant to interact with others. Instead, as soon as he was able to read, he immersed himself in books. -
Impartial to War
After graduating high school, Feyerabend was drafted into World War II in 1942. Before the war was over he had attained the rank of Major, though he claims to have been thoroughly detached from the politics of the whole thing. -
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Focus on Philosophy
After the war, he returned to Vienna where he attended lectures and seminars on Philosophy. These lectures decidedly went against his eventual views, but they are still credited for his focus on Philosophy. -
Split From Popper
In the summer of 1956, Feyerabend chaired a seminar in Alpbach, a town in Austria. The theme of his discussions here was that "there is no separate 'observation-language' or 'everyday-language' against which the theoretical statements of science are tested". This view would go on to be the foundation for much of his work and marked a definitive shift away from his former mentor, Karl Popper. -
Thesis I
One of his early publications, "An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience", introduces us to "Theses I". This is the idea that "the interpretation of an observation-language is determined by the theories we use to explain what we observe, and it changes as soon as those theories change". -
Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism
His well-known paper entitled "Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism" is published and introduces the world to another common theme in his work, the concept of incommensurability. Incommensurability refers to the claim that if the meaning of words derives from their use in theories, then the same words found in different theories cannot have the same meaning. -
Epistemoligical Anarchism
At a seminar in Hamburg, Feyerabend concludes that In order to solve any problem a person "must be given complete freedom and cannot be restricted by any demands or norms, however plausible they may seem...". This is the basis for what he later called Epistemological Anarchism, which states that there is no methodological approach to science or the pursuit of knowledge that is immune to exceptions. -
Against Method
In his article "Against Method", he directly criticized established theories of scientific methodology. -
The Great Debate?
Paul Feyerabend and his good friend Imre Lakatos planned a debate on Methodology, wherein he would attack methodology in science, and Lakatos would defend it. Unfortunately, Lakatos died suddenly in February of 1974, before the debate could happen. -
Tribute to a Friend
In a book that shared the title with his "Against Method" article, Feyerabend released the works that would have comprised his side of the debate between himself and Lakatos. He dedicated the so-called "collage" of works to his late friend. -
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Something to Remember Me By
In the last years of his life, Feyerabend spent the majority of his time working on his autobiography. He wanted to leave something behind for the world to remember him by, other than his highly contested works. He finished his autobiography and passed away on February 11, 1994. -
Present Day
Though many outwardly opposed his ideas, and still do, his thoughts had a tremendous impact on fields like Science, Philosophy, and Sociology that can not be denied.