---
title: "Paul Feyerabend"
chunk: 9/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:36:42.054365+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In Feyerabend's later work, especially in Conquest of Abundance, Feyerabend articulates a metaphysical theory in which the universe around us is 'abundant' in the sense that it allows for many realities to be accepted simultaneously. According to Feyerabend, the world, or 'Being' as he calls it, is pliable enough that it can change in accordance with the ways in which we causally engage with the world. In laboratories, for example, scientists do not simply passively observe phenomena but actively intervene to create phenomena with the help of various techniques. This makes entities like 'electrons' or 'genes' real because they can be stably used in a life that one may live. Since our choices about what lives we should live depend on our ethics and our desires, what is 'real' depends on what plays a role in a life that we think is worth living. Feyerabend calls this 'Aristotle's principle' as he believes that Aristotle held the same view.
Being, therefore, is pliable enough to be manipulated and transformed to make many realities that conform to different ways of living in the world. However, not all realities are possible. Being resists our attempts to live with it in certain ways and so not any entity can be declared as 'real' by mere stipulation. In Feyerabend's words,

 "I do not assert that any [form of life] will lead to a well-articulated and livable world. The material humans...face must be approached in the right way. It offers resistance; some constructions (some incipient cultures - cargo cults, for example) find no point of attack in it and simply collapse" 
This leads Feyerabend to defend the disunity of the world thesis that was articulated by many members of the Stanford School. There are many realities that cannot be reduced to one common 'Reality' because they contain different entities and processes. This makes it possible that some realities contain gods while others are purely materialistic, although Feyerabend thought that materialistic worldviews were deficient in many unspecified ways.
Feyerabend's ideas about a 'conquest of abundance' were first voiced in Farewell to Reason, and the writings of the late 1980s and early 1990s experiment with different ways of expressing the idea, including many of the articles and essays published as part two of Conquest of Abundance. A new theme of this later work is the ineffability of Being, which Feyerabend developed with reference to the work of the Christian mystic, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The remarks on ineffability in Conquest of Abundance are too unsystematic to definitively interpret.

=== Philosophy of mind ===

==== Eliminative materialism ====
Along with a number of mid-20th century philosophers (most notably, Wilfrid Sellars, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Richard Rorty), Feyerabend was influential in the development of eliminative materialism, a radical position in the philosophy of mind. On some definitions, eliminative materialism holds that all that exists are material processes and, therefore, our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind ("folk psychology") is false. It is described by a modern proponent, Paul Churchland, as follows:

 "Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience." 
Feyerabend wrote on eliminative materialism in three short papers published in the early sixties. The most common interpretation of these papers is that he was an early forerunner of eliminative materialism. This was a major influence on Patricia and Paul Churchland. As Keeley observes, "[Paul Churchland] has spent much of his career carrying the Feyerabend mantle forward." More recent scholarship claims that Feyerabend was never an eliminative materialist and merely aimed to show that common criticisms against eliminative materialism were methodologically faulty. Specifically, on this interpretation, while Feyerabend defended eliminative materialism from arguments from acquaintance and our intuitive understanding of the mind, he did not explicitly claim that eliminative materialism was true. In doing so, Feyerabend leaves open the possibility that dualism is true but this would have to be shown through scientific arguments rather than philosophical stipulation. In any case, Feyerabend explicitly disavows materialism in his later philosophical writings.

==== Cognitive plasticity ====
Feyerabend briefly entertains and is sympathetic to the hypothesis that there are no innate, cognitive limitations imposed upon the human brain. By this he meant that there were no intrinsic limitations about what we can conceive or understand. Spread out through Feyerabend's writings are passages that suggest that this is confirmed by evidence at the time in the mind-brain sciences. Specifically, he claims that "until now only two or three per cent of the inbuilt circuits of the brain have been utilised. A large variety of [change] is therefore possible." The brain, therefore, is largely plastic and can be adapted in numerous unknown ways. Similarly, he cites Nietzsche's philological findings about changes in perception from classical to Hellenistic Greece. He also criticizes E.O. Wilson's claim that genes limit "human ingenuity" which he claims can only be discovered by acting as if there are no limits to the kinds of lives humans can live. While Feyerabend's remarks on this subject are vague and merely suggestive, they have received uptake and confirmation in more recent research.

=== Political philosophy ===