Killing time : the autobiography of / Paul Feyerabend.

Includes index.

Family--- Growing up--- High School--- Occupation and war--- Apolda and weimar--- University and early travels--- Sex, song and electrodynamics--- London and after--- Bristol--- Berkeley, the first twenty years--- London, Berlin and New Zealand--- Against method--- Brighton, Kassel and Zurich--- Marriage and retirement--- Fading away.

Feyerabend's legacy is immense: the sea change in the way we understand science would have been impossible without him. Contentious, often unforgiving, Feyerabend here is also reflective, even lyrical about the pleasures of philosophy and his love for Grazia Borrini, with whom he shared the last decade of his life. Rarely has an intellectual of this stature told his story with such openness, honesty, or joy.

Killing Time is the story of an extraordinary life. Finished only weeks before Paul Feyerabend's death, 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. 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. "Anything goes," he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it.