Feyerabend and Wittgenstein

In this chapter I consider the ambivalent relation between Feyerabend and Wittgenstein. I first recount the facts that pertain to this relation and then focus on Feyerabend’s philosophical work and the influence it received from Wittgenstein’s. I argue that Feyerabend remained much closer to Popper, and his Viennese positivist roots, than to Wittgenstein in the greater part of his career, but was idiosyncratically influenced by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in his own early and late writings. In his early work, Feyerabend used Wittgenstein’s discussion of perception to challenge the theory-observation dichotomy while in his late work he appropriated Wittgenstein’s focus on particulars to combat abstract theorizing and Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning to contest the view that meanings are determined by phenomena. Yet, despite the influence, I argue that the orientations of the two philosophers diverge. Feyerabend, a staunch reformist, criticized Wittgenstein as a conformist and contrasted his pluralism to Wittgenstein’s considerations of alternative games. Finally, I question whether Feyerabend’s anti-scientism and emphasis on the sense of wonder at the mysteriousness of life and the world match ostensibly similar remarks made by Wittgenstein.