Against Authority: Paul K. Feyerabend´s Life and Thought

The project aims to shed new light on the thought of the Austrian philosopher of science Paul K. Feyerabend (1924-1994). It thoroughly reconsiders his life and work by situating his philosophical output and intellectual trajectory within the broader context of his life, encompassed within the framework of twentieth-century history, thus paving the way for Feyerabend`s first comprehensive intellectual biography. During his lifetime, Feyerabends pluralistic, anti-methodological, and relativistic views, his turn from a normative to a historical approach to science studies, and his peculiarly un-academic demeanour were highly controversial, earning him the typically dubious fame of eccentric personalities. The scholarship that has flourished over the three decades since his death has strived to make sense of his seemingly radical, unsystematic, and questionably thought-provoking views, showing how they were vindicated by mainstream trends in contemporary philosophy of science. This project is based on the persuasion that a biographical approach to Feyerabends thought yields a thicker understanding of his entire philosophical trajectory than those advanced so far, succeeding in doing justice to the complexity and depth of his thought. The central hypothesis underpinning the project is that the critical pluralism pervasive in Feyerabends philosophy is closely connected to an anti-authoritarian stance, and that this, in turn, is to be understood as Feyerabends response to the consequences of his early education in a totalitarian regime, his traumatic war experience and his formative years in postwar Vienna. The project shifts the focus of scholarly attention from Feyerabends epistemological positions to the behavioural, ethical, and political stance behind his philosophical views and intellectual contributions in academic philosophy of science and beyond. From this perspective, it is argued that the views, strategies, and arguments Feyerabend conceived and deployed at different stages of his evolving thought can be fully appreciated only against the background of a central and relatively stable basis of ethical and political motivations, as well as the historical situations in which Feyerabend acted. The project combines textual analysis and rational reconstruction of Feyerabends published output and Nachlass with a detailed historical reconstruction of the circumstances, contexts, and processes of ideation, composition, publication and reception of Feyerabends work, based on extensive research into archival and oral history sources. Conceptual tools developed by intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge and of philosophy, and social and clinical psychology are systematically used to inquire into the macro-, meso-, and micro-dimensions of Feyerabends intellectual life. The internal dynamics and mutual connections between these dimensions will provide structural unity and systematic depth to the biographical narrative.