Overview

Killing Time is the story of Paul Feyerabend's life. Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals. Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of ""big"" science and ""big"" philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic ""epistemological anarchism:"" he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths; not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world. ""Anything goes,"" he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it. Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time. Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the ""worst enemy of science.""

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Reviews

A fascinating memoir with an ending that will change many people's opinion about the Peck's bad boy of philosophy. Feyerabend (who died in 1994) was one of the gadflies of 20th-century philosophy of science. Viennese-born, he served during WW II in the German army and was wounded in the retreat from Poland - wounds that left him crippled and impotent. Did that stop him from a life of romantic involvements and multiple marriages? No way. Nor did this essentially inquiring mind ever cease knocking authority and criticizing the foundations of Western culture. Yet the Nazi takeover of Vienna in 1938 washed over a schoolboy with no consciousness of anti-Semitism but many memories of family eccentricities, suicides, and encounters with ghostly relatives. In his postwar studies, Feyerabend (Science in a Free Society, 1978, etc.) quickly abandoned history in favor of science and philosophy: Soon he was imbibing and disgorging opinions about Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Niels Bohr, and others; his brash, no-holds-barred critiques brooked no elitism and assumed no superiority of rationalism or the scientific method. His big mouth, wide reading, and immersion in other cultural pursuits (spurred by a gifted singing voice and a theatrical sensibility) made him attractive to universities here and abroad; he spent his last years teaching at Berkeley and in Zurich, with time set aside for Rome and the company of his adored wife, Grazia. This last great love transformed the exuberant iconoclast into a touching figure who demands our regard and sympathy. In the end he reiterates his lifelong argument that the West cannot continue to blindly exalt reason; there must be a recognition of other paths to knowledge. Not a basic primer so much as an emperor's-new-clothes account of academic philosophy by a man who found meaning in his own life through a commitment to one who shared his concern for all humanity. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) held numerous teaching posts throughout his career in Europe and the United States. Among his books are Against Method; Science in a Free Society; Farewell to Reason; and Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

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