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Thinkers

Paul Feyerabend

Analytic · North America · 1924 to 1994

Austrian-born philosopher of science who held that no single method explains the success of science.

What it is

Paul Feyerabend (1924 to 1994) was an Austrian philosopher of science. He was born in Vienna and began as a follower of Karl Popper, whose view that science progresses by testing and refuting theories he defended early on. Later he became one of the sharpest critics of the idea that science follows a single method that makes it superior to other ways of knowing.

He taught at Bristol, then for three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, with posts in London, Berlin, Yale, Auckland, Sussex and, in the 1980s, the ETH in Zurich. His book Against Method (1970 as an article) made him famous and controversial, and he spent much of his later life answering those who thought he had been reckless.

The main ideas

  • No single method. In Against Method he attacked accounts of science that say there is one identifiable set of rules that makes good science good. The title of the article calls his own view an anarchistic theory of knowledge.
  • Meaning and theory. Early on he held that theories shape the meaning of observation sentences, so the same observation statement can say different things under different theories.
  • Science has no special claim to authority. He argued that the arguments for giving science a privileged place in culture do not hold, because its results have often depended on non-scientific elements.
  • Science is not one thing. In his last lectures he said that science is incomplete and disunified, and that appeals to "Science" as a single voice are out of place.
  • Myths about science. He called it a myth that science starts from facts without theories, and a myth that it is free of values.
  • Free society. In Science in a Free Society he drew out the political consequences of this view.

What it looks like in practice

Picture a town deciding how to deal with an illness, with a scientist, a local healer and a patient group all in the room. Feyerabend would ask why only one of them should decide what counts as knowledge, and what the town might lose by silencing the others. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • "Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism" (1962) is the centrepiece of his early work, joining Popper and Wittgenstein.
  • Against Method (article 1970, book later) is his best-known work, an attack on the idea of a fixed scientific method.
  • Science in a Free Society (1978) gathers his replies to critics and his political conclusions.
  • The Tyranny of Science (2011) is built from lectures he gave in the early 1990s.

Questions and criticism

  • Misread or reckless? He was shocked to be accused of being aggressive and nasty, and he in turn said reviewers had misread his irony and playfulness.
  • Does science win by merit? He held that science wins out over other forms of knowledge for reasons that are not purely scientific. Critics ask what, if anything, then separates good knowledge from bad.
  • Where does it stop? If no method is privileged, it is fair to ask on what basis anyone should prefer one account over another.

Close neighbours

Karl Popper was his mentor and, later, the thinker he argued with, and Ludwig Wittgenstein shaped his early view of meaning. The page on Thomas Kuhn shows another philosopher who challenged the idea of a single method in science.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Karl Popper · He began as a follower of Popper and later turned against his rules for science.
  • Thomas Kuhn · The two exchanged ideas on how scientific frameworks differ and cannot be directly compared. (scholars disagree about this link)

Reacted against

  • Karl Popper · He argued that Popper's rules for testing theories would have stopped many great advances.

Other Analytic thinkers

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