Feyerabend and Lakatos

Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos were the closest of friends and disputing intellectual comrades until Lakatos’ early death in 1974. Against Method (1975) was to have been co-written as For and Against Method, with Lakatos delivering his own historicist and rationalist attack on Feyerabend’s skepticism about universal scientific method. This chapter describes their complementary and competing ideas on some major episodes from the history of science, including a shared critical appraisal of Newton’s philosophy of method compared to his scientific practice. Feyerabend’s views in Against Method on the emergence of Western rationalism in the Presocratics is deepened by Lakatos’ anti-foundationalism in mathematics, as developed in the posthumously published Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery (1976). In the philosophy of science, Feyerabend argued that Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes was an ‘anarchism’ in disguise, with that appraisal placed here in the context of Lakatos’ Hegelian historiography and its Hungarian intellectual sources.