Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul FeyerabendKilling 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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LibraryThing Review
User Review - timoroso - LibraryThingNot really an autobiography you would expect from a philosopher. This is not a dense academic book but a relaxed and honest confession. Unlike Rousseau though, Feyerabend is funny too. It is difficult ... Read full review
KILLING TIME: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend
User Review - KirkusA 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 ... Read full review
Contents
1 Family | 1 |
2 Growing Up | 11 |
3 High School | 21 |
4 Occupation and War | 36 |
5 Apolda and Weimar | 54 |
6 University and Early Travels | 62 |
7 Sex Song and Electrodynamics | 79 |
8 London and After | 87 |
10 Berkeley the First Twenty Years | 111 |
11 London Berlin and New Zealand | 127 |
12 Against Method | 139 |
13 Brighton Kassel and Zurich | 153 |
14 Marriage and Retirement | 165 |
15 Fading Away | 177 |
Postscript | 183 |
185 | |
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