He writes compellingly and with extraordinary honesty of living through Nazism and his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. For the first time, Feyerabend traces his trajectory from a lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. Yet few know much about the private life of this most public of intellectuals. "Anything goes", he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. In landmark essays and books, and in legendary lectures delivered from Berlin to Berkeley, 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. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. Finished only weeks before Paul Feyerabend's death, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals. Killing Time is the story of an extraordinary life.
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