66 Facts About Paul Feyerabend

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of science.

Paul Feyerabend started his academic career as lecturer in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol ; afterwards, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades.

Paul Feyerabend gave lecture series at Stanford University, the University of Kassel and the University of Trento.

Paul Feyerabend wrote on topics related to the politics of science in several essays and in his book Science in a Free Society.

Paul Feyerabend is recognized as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century.

Paul Feyerabend was a significant figure in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Paul Feyerabend was a seamstress and died on July 29,1943 by suicide.

Paul Feyerabend was inspired by his teacher Oswald Thomas and developed a reputation as knowing more than the teachers.

Paul Feyerabend sang in a choir under Leo Lehner and was later introduced to opera and inspired by performances from George Oeggl and Hans Hotter.

Paul Feyerabend later trained formally under the tutelage of Adolf Vogel and others.

Paul Feyerabend's mother was entranced by Hitler's voice and demeanor and his father was similarly impressed by Hitler's charisma and later joined the Nazi Party.

Paul Feyerabend himself was unmoved by the Anschluss or World War II, which he saw as an inconvenience that got in the way of reading and astronomy.

Paul Feyerabend was in the Hitler Youth as a part of compulsory policies and sometimes rebelled, praising the British or claiming he had to leave a meeting to attend Mass, and sometimes conformed, bringing in members who missed meetings.

Paul Feyerabend joined the Cultural Association for the Democratic Reform of Germany, the only association he ever joined.

Paul Feyerabend originally intended to study physics, astronomy, and mathematics but decided to study history and sociology to understand his wartime experiences.

Paul Feyerabend became dissatisfied and soon transferred to physics and studied astronomy, especially observational astronomy and perturbation theory, as well as differential equations, nuclear physics, algebra, and tensor analysis.

Paul Feyerabend took classes with Hans Thirring, Hans Leo Przibram, and Felix Ehrenhaft.

Paul Feyerabend was influenced by the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who invited him to be his assistant at the East Berlin State Opera, but Feyerabend turned down the offer.

In Vienna, Paul Feyerabend organized the Kraft Circle, where students and faculty discussed scientific theories and often focused on the problem of the existence of the external world.

Paul Feyerabend married his first wife, divorced, and became involved in various romantic affairs, despite his physical impotence.

Paul Feyerabend drew great pleasure from opera, which he could attend even five days a week, and from singing.

Paul Feyerabend attended Popper's lectures on logic and scientific method and became convinced that induction was irrational.

In 1955, Paul Feyerabend successfully applied for a lectureship at the University of Bristol with letters of reference from Karl Popper and Erwin Schrodinger and started his academic career.

At Berkeley, Paul Feyerabend mostly lectured on general philosophy and philosophy of science.

Paul Feyerabend often invited students and outsiders, including Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, to guest lecture on a variety of issues including gay rights, racism, and witchcraft.

Paul Feyerabend supported the students but did not support student strikes.

John Searle attempted to get Paul Feyerabend fired from his position for hosting lectures off-campus.

Paul Feyerabend asked students in his undergraduate classes to build something useful, like furniture or short films, rather than term papers or exams.

Lakatos had bought the house for representation purposes and Paul Feyerabend often made gentle fun of it, choosing to help Lakatos' wife to wash dishes after dinner rather than engaging in scholarly debates with 'important guests' in the library.

Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend planned to write a dialogue volume in which Lakatos would defend a rationalist view of science and Paul Feyerabend would attack it.

Paul Feyerabend mostly wanted to encourage attention to scientific practice and common sense rather than to the empty 'clarifications' of logicians, but his views were not appreciated by the intellectuals who were then directing traffic in the philosophical community, who tended to isolate him.

Paul Feyerabend exposed that by "avoiding scholarly ways of presenting a view" and using "common locutions and the language of show business and pulp instead".

Paul Feyerabend kept moving among academic appointments.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Paul Feyerabend was assigned a position as Professor of Philosophy at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.

Paul Feyerabend heard of Feyerabend from train passengers in Europe and attended his seminar in Berkeley.

Paul Feyerabend remained based in Meilen, in Switzerland, but often spent time with his wife in Rome.

Paul Feyerabend is buried in his family grave, in Vienna.

Paul Feyerabend argues that von Neumann's 'no-go' proof only shows that the Copenhagen interpretation is consistent with the fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics but it does not logically follow from them.

Paul Feyerabend provided his own solution to the measurement problem in 1957, although he soon came to abandon this solution.

Paul Feyerabend tries to show that von Neumann's measurement scheme can be made consistent without the collapse postulate.

Specifically, Paul Feyerabend offers several criticisms of empiricism and offers his own brand of theoretical pluralism.

Paul Feyerabend argues that all statements are hypothetically, since the act of observation requires theories to justify its veridicality.

One example Paul Feyerabend uses repeatedly is Brownian motion which was not a test of the second law of classical thermodynamics.

Paul Feyerabend learned of this idea from Kuhn, who argued that without tenacity all theories would have been prematurely abandoned.

Paul Feyerabend's theory appears in the same year as Thomas Kuhn's discussion of incommensurability in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but the two were developed independently.

Paul Feyerabend's pluralism is supported by what he calls the 'pragmatic theory of meaning' which he developed in his dissertation.

Joseph Agassi claims that it was caused by the student revolutions at Berkeley, which somehow promoted Paul Feyerabend's move towards epistemological anarchism defended in the 1970s.

Against this, Paul Feyerabend claims that Bohr was a pluralist who attempting to pursue a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics but abandoned it due to its conflict with the Bothe-Geiger and Compton-Simon experiments.

Paul Feyerabend thinks that this is justified because no two individuals are ever exactly alike and that procedures should therefore be able to vary.

On this view, Paul Feyerabend did not have an anarchist 'turn' but merely generalized his positive philosophy on a more general view.

Paul Feyerabend's position was seen as radical, because it implies that philosophy can neither succeed in providing a general description of science, nor in devising a method for differentiating products of science from non-scientific entities like myths.

Paul Feyerabend calls this 'Aristotle's principle' as he believes that Aristotle held the same view.

Paul Feyerabend wrote on eliminative materialism in three short papers published in the early sixties.

Specifically, on this interpretation, while Paul Feyerabend defended eliminative materialism from arguments from acquaintance and our intuitive understanding of the mind but did not explicitly claim that eliminative materialism was true.

Paul Feyerabend thought that citizens should use their own principles when making decisions about these matters.

Paul Feyerabend rejected the view that science is especially "rational" on the grounds that there is no single common "rational" ingredient that unites all the sciences but excludes other modes of thought.

Paul Feyerabend thought that scientific expertise was partially exaggerated by needless uses of jargon and technical language and that many contributions towards science were made by laypeople.

Paul Feyerabend thought that science funding agencies should be subject to democratic oversight.

Paul Feyerabend greatly admired Aristotle's philosophy, largely due to its productivity.

In Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend criticizes Popper's claim that Xenophanes, who Paul Feyerabend calls a "conceited bigmouth" with "considerable charm", was the first to engage in rational criticism in his arguments against anthropomorphic gods.

Paul Feyerabend further argues that some thinkers who came after Xenophanes, such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, rejected Xenophanes premise that the gods cannot be anthropomorphic.

Paul Feyerabend criticizes Xenophanes's pretensions to have developed a conception of God that has no human features, arguing that Xenophanes's God still engages in human activities.

Paul Feyerabend was one of the intellectual forefathers of social constructivism and science and technology studies, although he participated little in either field during his lifetime.

Paul Feyerabend's work was influential on several physicists who felt empowered to experiment with approaches different from those of their supervisors as well on many social scientists who were under great pressure to conform to the 'standards' of the natural sciences.

The book On the Warrior's Path quotes Paul Feyerabend, highlighting the similarities between his epistemology and Bruce Lee's worldview.

In 2024, on the centennial of Paul Feyerabend's birth, there is a planned series of conferences, workshops, publications, experimental art, song recitals, and theatre pieces in honor of Paul Feyerabend's life and works.