Feyerabend – Anything can go (1993)

Paul Karl Feyerabend was born in Vienna in 1924. He served in the German army’s Pioneer Corps during the second world war and in 1944 he received the Iron Cross. In 1946 he chose to study history and sociology at the University of Vienna’s Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, thinking that history, unlike physics, was concerned with real life. But he became dissatisfied with the study of history, and returned to theoretical physics. Together with a group of science students, Feyerabend infiltrated philosophy lectures and seminars. He later recalled that in all interventions he took the radical ‘positivist’ line that science is the basis of all knowledge; that it is empirical; and that non-empirical enterprises are either formal logic (which includes mathematics) or nonsense. This is the view associated with the Logical Positivists, a group of philosophers and scientists comprising the ‘Vienna Circle’, which flourished in Austria from the early 1920s. In 1948, Feyerabend met the philosop