Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend’s life. Completed solely weeks earlier than his dying in 1994, it’s the self-portrait of one among this century’s most unique and influential intellectuals.

Skilled in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was greatest referred to as a thinker of science. However he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a author of guidelines. Quite, his fame was in highly effective, plain-spoken critiques of “massive” science and “massive” philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic “epistemological anarchism:” he argued forcefully that there’s not one solution to data, however many principled paths; not one fact or one rationality however completely different, competing footage of the workings of the world. “Something goes,” he mentioned concerning the methods of science in his most well-known guide,
In opposition to Technique. And he meant it.

Right here, for the primary time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an remoted, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the peak of worldwide tutorial success. He writes of his expertise within the German military on the Russian entrance, the place three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong ache. He remembers his promising expertise as an operatic tenor (a lifelong ardour), his encounters with everybody from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable amorous affairs, 4 marriages, and a profession so wealthy he as soon as held tenured positions at 4 universities on the identical time.

Though not written as an mental autobiography,
Killing Time sketches the folks, concepts, and conflicts of sixty years. Feyerabend writes frankly of difficult relationships together with his mentor Karl Popper and his good friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a rising fame because the “worst enemy of science.”