Feyerabend and the Vienna Circle

Vienna-born Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) is one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century, who has been the subject of controversial debates among the general public beyond the world of academic scholars right up to the present day. He gained this image after the publication of his book Against Method (1975)/Wider den Methodenzwang. Skizze einer anarchistischen Erkenntnistheorie (1976), which radically criticized the normative analytical philosophy of science. Before this career as a provocateur and enfant terrible of the philosophy of science, Feyerabend experienced a little-noticed intellectual socialization in Vienna, which shaped him until the end of his life, as can be grasped from his autobiography Killing Time (1994)/Zeitverschwendung (1995). After WW II Feyerabend studied at the University of Vienna art history and natural sciences before devoting himself to philosophy. Here he joined the discussion circle around the philosophy professor Viktor Kraft (the so called “Third Vienna Circle”), who, as the last member of the Vienna Circle, tried for a short time to continue this tradition. Ludwig Wittgenstein also participated in this circle shortly before his death, as did his later his literary heir Elizabeth Anscombe from England. All these conversations flowed into his dissertation Zur Theorie der Basissätze (1951). Feyerabend then worked as an assistant to visiting professor Arthur Pap from the USA in 1953/54, for whom he prepared the book Analytische Erkenntnistheorie (1955), dedicated to the Vienna Circle. From 1948 Feyerabend was a member of the Austrian College / Forum Alpbach, where he also met Karl Popper, and translated bestseller The Open Society and its Enemies (2 volumes) into German. In London, he became friends with Imre Lakatos, who had been exiled from Hungary and with whom he planned the joint book project “For and Against Method”. This remained unfinished due to Lakatos’ early death, so that his original essay “Against Method” (1970) in “Minnesota Studies” (ed. by Herbert Feigl’s “Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science”) became an international bestseller as a later monograph in 1975. In it, he argued against a privileged scientific method in favor of a historically oriented pluralistic philosophy of science. These forgotten episodes of early Feyerabend and his intellectual return to Vienna with the appreciation of Ernst Mach are described and contextualized.