Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend Paperback – November 15, 1996

Typical Feyerabend arrogance, spiced with unbearable charm. Brimming with intimate details of his sexual experiences, fighting with the Nazi Army on the Western Front, his lifelong (almost) apathy toward academic philosophy, and his real passion: opera singing. Philosophy, it turns out, was "just a job." I had *no* idea that Paul Feyerabend once possessed a "world voice" for opera. It was opera he loved. About 1/3 of the story is about operas he'd seen worldwide, who sang the roles, his critical opinion of the singing!
Also includes his bookish, only-child upbringing; his horribly depressed mother and her suicide in his teens; his adult depressions; his affairs and marriages; and finally, his mature love for the beautiful Graziana, which allowed him some actual truth in this life. It ends with Graziana's reminder that most of Feyerabend's life was spent in chronic pain, the result of a gunshot to his groin during the Nazi retreat from Russia. That was the injury which rendered him sexually impotent at 20 - a recurring theme in the story.
By the last page, I was in tears. Imagine tears of compassion after reading the words of that anarchist maniac who wrote "Against Method"!! But tears there were. It's a very good book.

Amazing record by the philosoper. Inspiring for this lover of philosophy!

Moving memoir. It gives you a much better feeling for where his ideas came from. His end-of-life epiphany that love is all that matters is really touching.

One of the most moving, insightful, and honest autobiographies I've ever read. Unduly influenced by the standard ignorant rap on Against Method, I was also very surprised. Get it, especially if you have a background in math, physics, philosophy, or even music.

I haven't finished reading it. Although, I am still hoping to get something out of it. I do think he was an extraordinary person. The book is rather pedestrian.

I just finished this book for the second time, as I'm preparing to teach a 12-week philosophy of science seminar here that emphasizes Paul Feyerabend's work. What an amazing little autobiography this is, completed right before his untimely passing at age 70 from an inoperable brain tumor.

One could say that in the history of ideas we find, roughly speaking, two kinds of characters: the system-builders and the system-smashers. The former are motivated by a single grand vision of The Way Things Really Are and believe their individual reason has delivered this vision to them. The phenomenon goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. It goes through Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and the logical positivists' image of science. All these visions are different, of course. The system smashers also go back to the ancient Greeks: figures like Protagoras and Thrasymachus, Socrates's nemesis in Book II of Plato's Republic. They include (in his own way) Machiavelli, Descartes's predecessor Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein ... and in our time, Paul Feyerabend.

The Feyerabend that emerges from these pages is indeed human, all too human: we learn of his mother's suicide when he was in his teens and the curious distance he felt from his father as he buried himself in his studies. He fought in World War II in the German Army, caught bullets in his lower back, ended up impotent and in chronic pain from the war injury at age 20. Nonchalance about philosophy also emerges; it is almost as if he ended up in the field by chance. He'd pursued both singing and theater (I recall hearing somewhere that he had a very good voice!). He seems to have begun writing to clarify his thoughts, ending up with sweeping papers on Wittgenstein and on the philosophy of physics that found their way into print and got him on the map (and into the philosophy department at Bristol, in the U.K.). He did stints at the University of Minnesota's Center for the Philosophy of Science, ending up as everybody knows at Berkeley. His papers "Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism" (1962) and "Problems of Empiricism" (1965) shook philosophy of science almost as much as Kuhn's 1962 book did, and although the two are lumped together as "historicists" the kinds of pluralism and proliferation that Feyerabend advocated were very different from Kuhn's idea about a mature science having acquired a stable paradigm.

The Feyerabend who wrote *Against Method* (1975) appears truculent, ironic, often sarcastic, as he makes his point that every methodology ever proposed by philosophers for science has limits; important scientific advances would have been blocked had the "rules" proposed by philosophers of science been in force. The only "rule" that survives is "anything goes": not a rule, of course, but an ironic comment on the impossibility of a "scientific method" that holds for all times, places, and circumstances. Science has incorporated "nonscientific" elements many times. Could our knowledge base be improved by such elements today? is the eventual question.

Thus despite his fame, Feyerabend had little use for either philosophy or the philosophy of science as conventionally practiced. He often seemed to do what I call "winging it" through lectures; he apparently did this very well, being an extrovert with a gift of gab (I wouldn't be caught dead trying it, LOL). Some people have regarded him as an "enemy of science" (or of "reason"); he insists that he's an enemy only of a certain image of science, and of "reason" conceived as a set of rigid, context-free rules that always hold, an idea the later Wittgenstein probably destroyed. He had no use for critics who panned Against Method as offering a new "methodology" called "epistemological anarchism" whose one "rule" was "anything goes." He devoted the final third of the follow-up *Science in a Free Society* (1978) to his critics and gave it the hilarious title "Conversations With Illiterates."

What Feyerabend was serious about was opposition to those who would use the authority of science to force their opinions on others, including other peoples of the world whose worldviews and problems we Westerners barely understand. He speaks of the political control over science, although I'm not sure he realized the extent to which huge corporate concerns (example: the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry, or Big Pharma) already have branches of government such as the FDA in their pocket. This suggests that what we need is not so much political control over science but populist control over unaccountable corporations, although admittedly achieving any such ideal will be difficult. How those of us who want to live as we see fit can maintain defenses against those who *don't* want us to live as we see fit is probably the great unsolved problem of modern political philosophy. I don't see Feyerabend as having solved this problem, but he does offer an important perspective on it: beware of the person who offers you a set of Absolute Rules, or uses words like Reason and Truth as the intellectual equivalent of clubs to beat people into submission.

If anything, Feyerabend's overall philosophy (if he has one) emphasizes the importance of the local and the particular over the global and the universal. He believed the fundamental color, diversity, and richness of experience is lost when philosophers bury it under aircastles of abstraction. He spent his life trying to exhume this richness. I suspect the story is continued in his final book *Conquest of Abundance*, on which he was working when he received the fatal diagnosis and which he did not live to complete. Fortunately he'd finally found true love late in life, and it's clear from the moving final pages of this book that his marriage to Grazia Borrini Feyerabend had affected him deeply. If you can get through the final three pages of this book (including Grazia Borrini Feyerabend's "Postscript") without shedding a tear or two, something is wrong with you. I end with a remark made to British philosopher Norman Malcolm by one of the few major figures Feyerabend may have respected: Wittgenstein, who'd said, "What is the use of philosophy of all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life ...?" (from Malcolm's *Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir*, p. 35). I think Feyerabend would have agreed.