The essay featured photographs of three 'betrayers of the truth”: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. They blamed this trend on philosophers who deny that science discovers objective, absolute truths. In a 1987 essay in Nature, 'Where Science Has Gone Wrong,' two British physicists fretted over the public’s growing antipathy toward science. Below is an edited version of my write-up of one of the most challenging, entertaining thinkers I’ve ever met. I like to emphasize all the ways in which things are getting better (see for example “ Yes, Trump Is Scary, but Don't Lose Faith in Progress ”), but Feyerabend’s ferocious critiques of “progress” seem more apt than ever. See for example this four-part riff by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci on Feyerabend’s “defense of astrology.” I interviewed Feyerabend in 1992, and profiled him-as well as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn-in my 1996 book The End of Science. Maybe that’s why the name of this philosophical trouble-maker has been popping up so much lately. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the 'worst enemy of science.The weirder things get, the more relevant Paul Feyerabend becomes. Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. 'Anything goes,' he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic 'epistemological anarchism: ' he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of 'big' science and 'big' philosophy. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals.

Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life.

Killing Time by Paul Karl Feyerabend