Expand Search 1994, University of California: In Memoriam Paul K. Feyerabend, Philosophy: Berkeley Paul K. Feyerabend, Philosophy: Berkeley Professor Emeritus
Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher, died on February 11, 1994, in Geneva, having taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1959 until his early retirement in 1990. Feyerabend was born in Vienna in 1924. He had initially contemplated a stage career rather than one in academic life, but a severe wound, suffered in the Second World War, forced him to abandon that plan. After working in Berthold Brecht's theater for a while, he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study physics. However, a visit to Vienna by the American philosopher Arthur Pap eventually sparked his interest in philosophical questions concerning science and it was to these that he came to devote his professional life. Under Pap's influence Feyerabend initially adhered to a straightforwardly positivistic conception of science. This is evident in the edition of Pap's lectures which he brought out after their authors' premature death under the title Analytische Erkenntnistheorie . Soon afterwards he discovered, however, the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a fellow Viennese, and abandoned positivism in favor of a radical rethinking of the assumptions of science. Late in life he would still admit that "there is much Wittgenstein in all my papers," even though he kept a deliberate distance from the strict Wittgensteinians. What he inherited from Wittgenstein was, above all, a readiness to set aside traditional assumptions about both philosophy and science. Wittgenstein and Feyerabend might, for that reason, both be considered thinkers in the skeptical tradition and it is not surprising that in his later years Feyerabend should be increasingly attracted to the thought of Sextus Empiricus, the founder of philosophical skepticism. It was this attitude which he also found exemplified in the writings of Ernst Mach, another fellow Viennese, who is more often seen as a forerunner of modern positivism. | |
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