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The Worst Enemy of Science?: Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend

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This series of essays reanimates the real Feyerbend, too often associated with a series of much denounced one-liners, such as the 'anything goes' pronouncement. In fact, Feyerbend rides the dialectical red zone in hairpin turns near the unexplored terrain where science fans, groupies, Darwin fanatics, and the 'anally overtrained' fear to tread, lest their weltanschaung be seen as Romantic poets once saw it. As a science fan myself, I can only watch in wonder and some sadness the 'social construction', in the age of Big Science, of something more sophisticated than, but not altogether different from, what the Church Fathers concocted from thin air, thereby freezing the minds of the many for millennia. It can't happen again, but it can attempt to happen again. That's the nice thing about science, you will lose all your paradigms, sooner better than later.

There is a very short explication of the title "The Worst Enemy of Science" in the Preface (pp. v-vi, signed by Gonzalo Munevar), where it is curtly stated: "Paul Feyerabend was once described in Nature as "The Worst Enemy of Science"." A more detailed reference than this briefest of mentions is nowhere given in the whole book. The book naturally contains (like all Academic books) hundreds of other (scrupulously) full references of much lesser importance. What is the precise Nature reference to Feyerabend as "The Worst Enemy of Science"? Or is this a pure legend, perhaps invented by Feyerabend himself (who loved exaggerations, farcical tricks, and hoaxes of the "Anything Goes" type) so as to bolster his well-deserved notoriety?