Paul Feyerabend

Paul Karl Feyerabend (FY-ur-ah-bent; German: [ˈfaɪɐˌʔaːbm̩t]; January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in philosophy of science at the University of Bristol (1955–1958); afterward, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades (1958–1989). At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1967), the FU Berlin (1968), Yale University (1969), the University of Auckland (1972, 1975), the University of Sussex (1974), and the ETH Zurich (1980–1990). He gave lectures and lecture series at the University of Minnesota (1958–1962), Stanford University (1967), the University of Kassel (1977), and the University of Trento (1992).

Feyerabend's most famous work is Against Method (1975), wherein he argues that there are no universally valid methodological rules for scientific inquiry. He also wrote on topics related to the politics of science in several essays and in his book Science in a Free Society (1978). Feyerabend's later works include Wissenschaft als Kunst (Science as Art) (1984), Farewell to Reason (1987), Three Dialogues on Knowledge (1991), and Conquest of Abundance (released posthumously in 1999), which collect essays from the 1970s until Feyerabend's death. The uncompleted draft of an earlier work was released posthumously in 2009 as Naturphilosophie and translated to English in 2016 as Philosophy of Nature. This work contains Feyerabend's reconstruction of the history of natural philosophy from the Homeric period until the mid-20th century. In these works and others, Feyerabend wrote about numerous issues at the interface between history and philosophy of science and ethics, ancient philosophy, philosophy of art, political philosophy, medicine, and physics. His final work was an autobiography, Killing Time, which he completed on his deathbed. Feyerabend's extensive correspondence and other materials from his Nachlass continue to be published.