Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, born in Vienna on 13 January 1924 and died in Genolier, Switzerland, on 11 February 1994. He held positions at the London School of Economics and, for most of his career from the 1960s onward, the University of California, Berkeley. His 1975 book Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge argues from detailed case studies in the history of astronomy and physics, most centrally Galileo, that no fixed methodological rule survives contact with how major scientific advances actually happened; scientists who followed the rules of their day as strictly as later textbooks imply would often have discarded the theories now considered their greatest successes. He summarised the resulting position, often shortened to the slogan anything goes, as epistemological anarchism: not that method or evidence do not matter, but that no single rule holds across every context science has actually faced. The position remains one of the most contested in twentieth-century philosophy of science, read by supporters as an honest account of scientific practice and by critics as license for relativism about which claims are worth believing.