Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. Love and personal understanding are much more important. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. His Who's Who entry remarked: 'My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. He sympathized with religious fundamentalists who wanted creationism to be taught in public schools. He likened science to voodoo, witchcraft and astrology. Feyerabend summed up his anti-credo with the phrase 'anything goes.'įeyerabend's penchant for posturing made it all too easy to reduce him to outrageous sound bites. He derided Popper's emphasis on falsification as 'a tiny puff of hot air in the positivistic teacup,' and he argued that Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions could apply to organized crime. His first and most famous book, Against Method, argued that philosophy cannot provide a rationale for science, since there is no rationale to explain. One way for a skeptic to sidestep this pitfall is to embrace-even revel in-paradox, irony and rhetorical excess. Kuhn twisted himself in knots trying to explain precisely what he meant when he talked about the impossibility of true, objective communication. Popper, who railed against certainty in science and politics, pounded the table and insisted that he was not dogmatic. Popper and Kuhn both fell into this trap in their interviews with me. Smirking at the camera, he seemed to be plotting some great mischief.Īll philosophical skeptics are vulnerable to self-contradiction. Feyerabend, whom the physicists called science’s “worst enemy,' looked especially subversive. The essay featured photographs of three 'betrayers of the truth”: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. They blamed this trend on philosophers who deny that science discovers objective, absolute truths. In a 1987 essay in Nature, 'Where Science Has Gone Wrong,' two British physicists fretted over the public’s growing antipathy toward science. Below is an edited version of my write-up of one of the most challenging, entertaining thinkers I’ve ever met. I like to emphasize all the ways in which things are getting better (see for example “ Yes, Trump Is Scary, but Don't Lose Faith in Progress ”), but Feyerabend’s ferocious critiques of “progress” seem more apt than ever. See for example this four-part riff by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci on Feyerabend’s “defense of astrology.” I interviewed Feyerabend in 1992, and profiled him-as well as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn-in my 1996 book The End of Science. Maybe that’s why the name of this philosophical trouble-maker has been popping up so much lately. The weirder things get, the more relevant Paul Feyerabend becomes.

Killing Time by Paul Karl Feyerabend