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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paul Feyerabend | 4/12 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T03:36:42.054365+00:00 | kb-cron |
Feyerabend's primary academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. While he was hired there in 1958, he spent part of his first years in the United States at the University of Minnesota, working closely with Herbert Feigl and Paul Meehl after rejecting a job offer from Cornell University. In California, he met and befriended Rudolf Carnap, whom he described as a "wonderful person, gentle, understanding, not at all as dry as would appear from some (not all) of his writings", and Alfred Tarski, among others. He also married for a third time. At Berkeley, Feyerabend mostly lectured on general philosophy and philosophy of science. During the student revolution, he also lectured on revolutionaries (Lenin, Mao, Mill, and Cohn-Bendit). He often invited students and outsiders, including Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, to guest lecture on a variety of issues including gay rights, racism, and witchcraft. He supported the students but did not support student strikes. John Searle attempted to get Feyerabend fired from his position for hosting lectures off-campus.
As Feyerabend was highly marketable in academia and personally restless, he kept accepting and leaving university appointments while holding more 'stable' positions in Berkeley and London. For instance, starting in 1968, he spent two terms at Yale, which he describes as boring, feeling that most there did not have "ideas of their own." There, however, he did meet Jeffrey Bub, and the two became friends. He remembered attempting to give everyone in graduate seminars 'As', which was strongly resisted by the students at Yale. He also asked students in his undergraduate classes to build something useful, like furniture or short films, rather than term papers or exams. In the same years, he accepted a new chair in philosophy of science in Berlin and a professorship in Auckland (New Zealand). In Berlin, he faced a 'problem' as he was assigned two secretaries, fourteen assistants and an impressive office with antique furniture and an anteroom, which "gave him the willies":
“...I wrote and mailed my own letters, including official ones ... never had a mailing list or any list of my publications, and I threw away most of the offprints that were sent to me... That took me out of the academic landscape, but it also simplified my life. ... [In Berlin] the secretaries were soon used by my less independent colleagues and by the assistants. "Look," I said to them, "I was given 80,000 marks for starting a new library; go and buy all the books you want and run as many seminars as you like. Don't ask me-- be independent!". Most of the assistants were revolutionaries, and two of them were sought by the police. Yet, they didn't buy Che Guevara or Mao, or Lenin; they bought books on logic! "We have to learn how to think," they said, as if logic has anything to do with that. While teaching at the London School of Economics, Imre Lakatos often 'jumped in' during Feyerabend's lectures and started defending rationalist arguments. The two "differed in outlook, character and ambitions" but became very close friends. They often met at Lakatos' luxurious house in Turner Woods, which included an impressive library. Lakatos had bought the house for representation purposes and Feyerabend often made gentle fun of it, choosing to help Lakatos' wife to wash dishes after dinner rather than engaging in scholarly debates with 'important guests' in the library. "Don't worry" – Imre would say to his guests – "Paul is an anarchist". Lakatos and Feyerabend planned to write a dialogue volume in which Lakatos would defend a rationalist view of science and Feyerabend would attack it. This planned joint publication was put to an end by Lakatos's sudden death in 1974. Feyerabend was devastated by it.