Paul Feyerabend: my dissertation adviser 

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About a year ago I walked around the beautiful campus of the University of California at Berkeley.  Inevitably my steps took me to the manicured lawns by the Campanile, to the green grass where a long time ago I sat with other students, term after term, in Paul K. Feyerabend’s graduate seminar.  It was the early seventies, when Feyerabend was slowly putting together the manuscript of his greatest work, Against Method, the culmination of the revolution in philosophy of science that he and Thomas Kuhn had begun in 1962.  

Standing there, in the very spot where we used to sit around him over forty years ago, I could almost feel his presence, the force of his incomparable personality again. It took me back to the exciting beginning of a very long intellectual and personal journey.  And in both the personal and intellectual aspects of the journey Feyerabend had a great influence, not by having me become his “follower” – he would have found the thought repulsive – but by challenging my ideas while encouraging me to develop my own thoughts.

Feyerabend was born in Vienna in 1924.  During World War II, three Russian bullets left him crippled for the rest of his life (he called himself a cripple and would make fun of euphemisms like “handicapped”).  After the war he recovered enough to study physics and astronomy at the University of Vienna.  In those days Vienna was still a city of geniuses.  Feyerabend had a great voice, good enough to sing at the Vienna Opera House, and at one time Bertolt Brecht asked him to be his assistant.  Feyerabend also met Konrad Lorenz, who also asked him to be his assistant.  Although it was obvious that he had many talents, he ended writing his doctoral thesis in philosophy, under Victor Kraft.  After meeting Ludwig Wittengstein, Feyerabend made arrangements to work with him in Cambridge, but Wittengstein’s death forced him to end up as Karl Popper’s assistant instead.  All those Viennese figures influenced the young Feyerabend significantly, and in the long run that influence played an important role in the intellectual revolution that he forged with Kuhn in the Sixties and Seventies.

I did not know any of these things before I met him.  At Northridge I had read his famous article proposing what later came to be called “eliminative materialism,” and I had decided I wanted to do my Ph.D. with him.  I was thus extremely pleased to be one of the nine new students who joined the doctoral program at Berkeley in 1971.  That year, however, Feyerabend was away on leave.  I finally met him in early1973, during the second year of my doctoral studies.  I showed up in his seminar, thinking that I would just sit in – being cautious just in case the many students who dreaded his critical mind were right.  “What will be topic of your presentation?” he asked me after he sat down. “I am just sitting in,” I answered.  “If you want to stay you will have to give a presentation,” he insisted.  “But all my ideas are bizarre,” I said.  “Par for the course,” he answered, taking his schedule book out.  “When are you going to present them?”

         During my presentation, weeks later, I experienced in my own flesh how disconcerting his criticism could be – something I would have wished on my worst enemy, or on myself if I had really believed that criticism was the main source of progress.  Feyerabend questioned everything; he would argue against, and even make fun of what appeared to be obvious claims.  In a conversation with him no idea could be taken for granted.  That day I was as critical of his remarks as he was of mine, but left the classroom fearing that I had made a fool of myself.  He was very friendly, however, and invited me to lunch at the Golden Bear, an outdoor restaurant on campus.  That would be the first of many meals, not only at the Golden Bear, but at many other restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area and in Europe; meals in which his perceptive comments would jump from philosophy and science to music, or art, or theater, and back to philosophy again; the first of many discussions in which we would talk about women and make fun of each other. 

It was also during that first meal at the Golden Bear that we came to the understanding that the topic of my seminar presentation should become the topic of my dissertation.

Feyerabend was practically without ego, at least in his graduate seminar. One time, after I presented what I thought was a very original idea in that seminar, I tried to impress another professor with it. The professor told me Feyerabend had already published it some years previously. It was in one of the few papers of Feyerabend I had not read. But sure enough, the idea was in it. I asked him why he had not said anything to me. He said he had forgotten all about it, so when he heard me explain it, he thought the idea was mine and new. I wish I had learned his modesty, but I am afraid I’ve never managed to be that good of a person.

In his undergraduate courses he did lecture, and in his lectures he did more formally exposed students to his views, but he never pushed those views even then. What I did learn from Feyerabend was to be true to my own philosophical inclinations. I guess that is why I gravitated towards him so easily: he let me be myself.

I also learned from him that it was possible to hold the intuitions (or prejudices) that I had about science and philosophy without being a fool. I went into philosophy because I thought it was a mess that needed straightening out. I had all the impulses of an analytic philosopher but felt that analytic philosophy was a dead end. So it was wonderful to meet such an extraordinarily gifted man who thought along the same lines (well, roughly) and encouraged me.

Many others also felt encouraged in his presence.  His seminars were popular with science students, several of which presented previews of their dissertations while sitting on the grass.  I remember one wonderful dissertation on general relativity.  I also remember a doctoral student in epidemiology take on the medical research on cholesterol in the diet, which had already led to the prohibition of eggs, and was soon to lead to cartons of egg whites in grocery stores.  As he told us, the almost hysterical warnings about eggs came from a study that had been carried out in six English-speaking countries and that had found a correlation between cholesterol in the diet and heart disease.  Some researchers thought those six societies were quite similar to each other and some other factor instead might account for the rate of heart disease.  The study was then done over, that time in 22 countries, including all kinds of societies – big, small, rich, poor – and several languages.  This much better study yielded no correlation whatsoever between cholesterol in the diet and rates of heart disease.  Indeed, some of the countries with the highest rate of cholesterol in the diet had the lowest rates of heart disease.  Moreover, as he also pointed out, most of the blood cholesterol is produced by the body.  Nevertheless, the medical establishment was using and abusing its prestige to clamp down on eggs and other foods.  This was a great example of how bad science can easily become “scientific” fad. 

I only wish I had learned the lesson better.  I would have then been much more cautious when hearing the pronouncements of the medical establishment in favor of the now infamous “Food Pyramid” and its emphasis on diets with extremely high carbs, which in a couple of decades turned this country into a land of obese diabetics.  Feyerabend, incidentally, was very weary of Western medical advice.

Apart from becoming my dissertation adviser, Feyerabend made me his teaching assistant for his upper division courses.  He also taught, for several years, an introductory course in philosophy, with which I had no connection.  At the beginning of one school year I ran into him on campus.  “Let’s go have something to drink,” he said.  I mentioned to him that he was supposed to be teaching that introductory course very shortly.  He pointed out that since it was the first day of the term, he was going to spend only a few minutes with the students.  So I went with him to the classroom, where some 300 students were waiting for him.  He described what topics he was going to discuss.  He told them it was up to them whether to come or not.  And then he told them that no matter what they did in the final exam, which was required by the university, he was going to give them all A’s.  He then pointed to a stack of computer registration cards on the desk (to register for a class you had to get one of those cards) and told them to come and get them.  If perchance there were not enough cards for the large crowd, he would instruct the Registrar’s office to make as many as people requested.

As we were walking out, a group of students cornered him.  “You can’t do this!”  They told him.  “Why not?” He asked.  “It is my class.”

“Because it is not fair.  We, in this group, are going to work hard for a good grade.  But you are going to give A’s to people who will have done nothing.”

“What do you care, as long as you get your own A?”

A few years later I read Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed, in which there are two worlds in conflict, the planet of the liberals and the planet of the anarchists (as I remember it).  The story actually parallels the relationship between Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos.  At some point the Feyerabend character, who was a professor at a university in the planet of anarchists, gets invited to teach at the main university in the planet of liberals.  At the end of his first class, he tells the students that he is going to give them all the highest grade.  Immediately afterwards he is surrounded by a group of students who insist that he is not being fair.  It was almost word for word what the Berkeley students had said.  I always wondered whether Ursula Le Guin had been in the audience that day.  She was a Berkeley resident, after all.  And I believe both her parents had been professors at the University.

Feyerabend had made clear to me, incidentally, that he understood I had my own grading standards and that, as a teaching assistant, I was free to give his students whatever grades I thought appropriate.  That came as bad news to quite a few people.  I remember once getting a presumed final project, by an art major, which consisted of a large folder containing a large number of black cardboard ribbons and one white ribbon.  There was also a saw that had matches instead of teeth.  That was it.  I gave her an F.  A couple of days later I received a call from the student.  She claimed in her defense that her art project captured exactly what Feyerabend had been talking about all quarter long.  I asked her what she meant.  “Well,” she said, “he was talking all the time about black ribbons and how all you needed was a white ribbon.”  I realized then that she had not understood Paul’s heavy Viennese accent.  “It wasn’t black ribbons,” I told her.  “It was black ravens, when discussing the Logical Positivists’ problems with universal statements.  All you need is one white raven to show that the universal statement is false. Your project cannot possibly be considered appropriate for a final.”

She gave it one more try.  “I am calling you from my bathtub.  Would you like to come over so we can discuss it right here?”

No way.

The class incident had repercussions well beyond ending up in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.   The word got around campus that a professor was giving A’s away and that all you needed was to get a registration card from the Registrar’s office.  1200 students had then signed up for the class, while the classroom held just a few over 300!  The Registrar screamed bloody murder, and the Faculty Senate appointed a distinguished committee, including at least one Nobel Laureate, to look into the matter. 

At the meeting, the head of the committee respectfully said to him.  “Well, Professor Feyerabend.  Those are the charges against you.  But we feel that this must be a misunderstanding.  So if you could be so kind, please clarify the matter so we can put it behind us.”

“I don’t know what the big fuss is all about,” Feyerabend said.  “I’ve been doing this for many years.”

Needless to say, the Committee was appalled.  But I suspect there was a bit of a grudging admiration for him, and so the main actual sanction, that I remember, was that he could not teach a class with more than 50 students in it.  My own teaching assistantship was not affected.  Indeed, in 1974, I was assisting in his philosophy of science senior course when word came that Imre Lakatos had died of a heart attack.  Paul had completed the manuscript that became Against Method and was waiting for his best friend to write his response.  The idea was to publish the whole thing together.  And now Lakatos was dead!  And that happened right before he was to spend a week lecturing on Lakatos’ views.  Paul was devastated.  It was impossible for him to lecture.  So he asked me to do the lecturing on Lakatos.  And thus the class had to get used to a heavy South American accent in place of the heavy Austrian accent they were beginning to get used to.  At any rate, I felt very honored by his trust with such a topic at such a moment.  In retrospect the honor was even greater: one of the students in the class would go on to become a renowned Lakatosian scholar.

         To me, Paul Feyerabend was more than a terrific dissertation adviser, for he also became a life-long friend. To the very end of his life I was able to count on his advice and support.  Years before that sad moment, it was with great pride that I read his Preface to my first book, Radical Knowledge. 

I remember that feminists were constantly attacking him.  They could not stand his irreverence.  Well, when I ended up having problems of my own with the feminists, he advised me to write a novel about it.  He had read several of my short stories and thought I had a lot of talent for literature.  It took me many years, unfortunately, so he never got to see Alex in Femiland: A Politically Incorrect Novel of Morals.  In at least one of the chapters, the characters discuss Feyerabend and his works.  Thus, I have had the satisfaction of talking about him not only in my philosophy of science but even in my fiction.

         Someone wrote in the famous journal Nature that Feyerabend was the worst enemy of science.  But, on the contrary, what Feyerabend did was demonstrate how complex and human science can and should be.  Of his many contributions, perhaps the most important is that there is no method or rule that can capture the nature of science.  Even the most excellent idea about the practice of science must allow for exceptions. And when we examine the history of science, we discover not only that the great scientists violated the so-called “empirical method,” in all its main incarnations, but they had to violate it, for otherwise the great accomplishments by which we know them today would not have come to pass

         Some intellectuals, particularly analytic philosophers in the English speaking world, felt that Feyerabend was insane, or at best the court jester in philosophy of science.  But many people around the world who have read his works, published in many languages, have thought very highly of those works.  Over the years I had doctoral students and post-docs from Europe, China and Africa come to work with me on Feyerabend.  I felt honored to be able to guide them.  Not that I refrained from criticizing him; surely no less than when I used to sit across a restaurant table from him, or on the grass at Berkeley, with the Campanile looming large behind him.

         Feyerabend was as mesmerizing in conversation as he was during his lectures.  It was difficult then to notice his metal crutch or the constant pain and bad health that he had to overcome during his adult life.  Before the great fame, or notoriety, that Against Method brought him, he was already an intellectual giant.  Standing on the grass by the Campanile a year ago, I vividly remembered his animated face, his contagious laughter, and that extraordinarily sharp mind that delighted his students, his colleagues, his friends – a mind worthy of the greatest admiration.