Education for a Free Society

Born in 1924 in Vienna, Feyerabend was drafted into the German army in 1942, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant. A battle injury received in 1945 would cause him health problems for the rest of his life. After the war, Feyerabend went to Thuringia to take on a job in the small town of Apolda and to study singing and stage-management in Weimar. Here he joined the ‘Cultural Association for the Democratic Reform of Germany’. He then returned to Vienna to study history and sociology but soon became dissatisfied and therefore transferred to physics. Here he met the physicist Felix Ehrenhaft, whose scientific practice would influence his later views on the nature of science. Changing his subject again – this time to philosophy – he submitted his final thesis on observation sentences. Meeting him for the first time in 1948 at the international summer seminar of the Austrian College Society in Alpbach, Feyerabend became a follower of Karl Popper – a fellowship that he would later renounce in strong words. While in Vienna, Feyerabend became the leader of the ‘Kraft Circle’, a student philosophy club centred around Viktor Kraft, a former member of the Vienna Circle, who was his dissertation supervisor. It was also during this time that Feyerabend met Ludwig Wittgenstein, who visited the Kraft Circle to give a talk, and Bertolt Brecht. An invitation to come to Cambridge for further studies under Wittgenstein was accepted. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein died before Feyerabend arrived in Cambridge, and so he went to London instead to study with Popper; he remained, however, very closely connected to Wittgenstein and would proceed to publish on his philosophy. Although Popper applied for an extension of Feyerabend’s scholarship, he decided to return to Vienna, while also declining an offer to become Popper’s research assistant. Instead, he became the assistant of Arthur Pap in Vienna. After his first academic appointment at the University of Bristol, Feyerabend accepted a visiting researcher position at the University of California in Berkeley in 1958, which was turned into a permanent position just one year later. In Berkeley, Feyerabend gradually increased the intellectual distance to Popper, so that in 1970, not only Consolations for the Specialist was published, in which he attacked Popper from the perspective of Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962/1970²), but also the essay version of ‘Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge’, in which he introduced for the first time his idea of an epistemological anarchism. After the plans to write a volume of For and Against Method together with Imre Lakatos had to be abandoned (Lakatos unfortunately died), Feyerabend published 1975 with Against Method his first book. He spent the following years defending the anarchistic epistemology and methodological plurality outlined here against his critics – attempts that culminated 1978 in the publication of Science in a Free Society, where he not only outlined his defence but also extended his argument into the political realm. The coming years saw a plethora of publications in which Feyerabend expanded and clarified his position, for example, through inclusion of reflections on the relation of the sciences and arts. In 1988, a second, revised edition of Against Method appeared. In 1989, after marrying Grazia Borrini, the couple left for Italy and Switzerland, and Feyerabend officially resigned from Berkeley in 1990. In between, he held several positions at different universities: University College London (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1967), the FU Berlin (1968), Yale University (1969), the University of Auckland (1972, 1975), the University of Sussex (1974), the ETH Zurich (1980–1990); he presented lecture series at Stanford University (1967), the University of Kassel (1977) and the University of Trento (1992).

In 1993, Feyerabend developed an inoperable brain tumour, and was hospitalised. Paul Feyerabend died in Genolier, Canton Vaud, Switzerland, on 11 February 1994. Posthumously, three more books were published: Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend (1995), Conquest of Abundance (1999), and Naturphilosophie (2009). Against Method was most recently re-published in 2010, accompanied by a preface written by Canadian philosopher of science Ian Hacking who calls the book ‘the Woodstock of Philosophy’. Feyerabend, one can take away from this, is as present as ever and people still engage with his work.

Feyerabend’s broad interest in cultural affairs touched, of course, questions about education and about the ways people are educated (or: indoctrinated) into scientific beliefs and worldviews. He famously argued that education is only then true education if its teaching includes a backdoor through which one is able to leave behind exactly those teachings. He was always appalled by the way in which sciences and philosophy are taught as indisputable truths, as facts rather than as imperfect, questionable theories or, even better, as practices of searching and philosophising. And he was appalled by the closed-mindedness of a scientifically grounded and philosophically defended education system, which seemed to exclude or belittle different ways of knowing and living. It is for those reasons that the editors decided for the main title for this volume: Education for a Free Society. Obviously mirroring the naming of one of Feyerabend’s own publications (Science for a Free Society), the title expresses our conviction that freedom represents one of or maybe even the most fundamental characteristics Feyerabend demands for education in its various guises; freedom, as the opportunity and capacity of accepting or rejecting the structures, opinions, perspectives that everybody is so forcefully invited to accept and share in a society, seems to lie at the very heart of everything Feyerabend thought about and practised as education.