Memoirs

I went to Berkeley with the aim of studying under Feyerabend 

Having read the first version of Against Method (the Spanish edition) in 1976, I had been struck by his ideas and became very motivated by this reading. As I  was  admitted to the graduate program  at UC Berkeley, and having been awarded a CAPES scholarship, in 1980, I moved to Berkeley with my children and with the support of my husband  who, albeit could not remain there with us all along, could visit us every now and then.

Feyerabend was a very vivid person, dynamic despite his disability, very caring for the students, witty, and almost insolent with his ironic comments about the institution and some colleagues. He was the most well-organized professor I ever had, his classes, having the largest audience, were carefully structured. We were  free to choose  the topics of the seminars, but Feyerabend demanded a commitment from the students, providing materials in advance for our colleagues. He was strict in regard to how to lead the presentations and  discussions. If there was  anything that was not clear, Feyerabend would interrupt the presentation and surprise everyone in the room with his relevant counterexamples. I attended his courses on the philosophy of science and theory of knowledge, usually given to enormous audiences, as well as his seminars for a smaller number  of students. Among these seminars, I participated in a seminar on Aristoteles, having been  assigned to give a presentation on the movement of the celestial bodies. However, there is no doubt that it was  the experience of having individual topics of study under Feyerabend that impressed me the most. I suggested studying Darwin’s On the Origin of  Species.  He accepted it  under the gracious condition that he would learn it from me as his focus was primarily on physics and astronomy. It was out of these studies that came out a long paper that eventually would be turned into my Ph.D. dissertation. He was always very thoughtful, to every point we discussed, and his comments turn out to be very useful to me until today. He would tell me, for instance, that if I wanted to find something afresh, speaking in terms of epistemology, I should look for it before the 19th century.

Text of 2005 provided by Luiz Abrahao from his obituary of Prof. Reigner (Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, 2020 (9): 1-7