Paul Feyerabend Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend
Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed

Paul Feyerabend
Science is not a closed book that is understood only after years of training. It is an intellectual discipline that can be examined and criticised by anyone who is interested, and that looks difficult and profound only because of a systematic campaign of obfuscation carried out by many scientists...

Paul Feyerabend
Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.

Paul Feyerabend
Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen.

Paul Feyerabend
The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious.

Paul Feyerabend
There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge.

Paul Feyerabend
A good teacher will not just make people accept a form of life, he will also provide them with means of seeing it in perspective and perhaps of even rejecting it.

Paul Feyerabend
People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.

Paul Feyerabend
Copemicanism and other essential ingredients of modem science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

Paul Feyerabend
There was a moment when I knew how nature worked. It had elegance and beauty. The goddam thing was gleaming.

Paul Feyerabend
Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

Paul Feyerabend
All religion may be centered around a generally good idea, however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards

Paul Feyerabend
Experts have a vested interest in their own playpens, and so they will quite naturally argue that 'education' is impossible without them (can you imagine an Oxford philosopher, or an elementary particle physicist arguing himself out of good money?)

Paul Feyerabend
Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.

Paul Feyerabend
Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.

Paul Feyerabend
[Responding to criticism from Dr. Hesse] Voodoo, Dr Hesse's piece de risistance', is case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness and confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even revise, our knowledge of physiology.

Paul Feyerabend
No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.

Paul Feyerabend
So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.

Paul Feyerabend
Humane science must be adapted to the requirements of a balanced and rewarding life.

Paul Feyerabend
Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.

Paul Feyerabend
The purpose of education, so one would think, is to introduce the young into life, and that means: into the society where they are born and into the physical universe that surrounds the society. The method of education often consists in the teaching of some basic myth. The myth is available in various versions. More advanced versions may be taught by initiation rites which firmly implant them into the mind. Knowing the myth, the grown-up can explain almost everything (or else he can turn to experts for more detailed information). He is the master of Nature and of Society. He understands them both and he knows how to interact with them. However, he is not the master of the myth that guides his understanding.

Paul Feyerabend
It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity", "truth", it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend
The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.

Paul Feyerabend
I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.

Paul Feyerabend
There is no coherent knowledge, i. e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains.

Paul Feyerabend
The ideas survived and they can now be said to be in agreement with reason. They survived because prejudice, passion, conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterize the context of discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have their way. To express it differently: Copernicanism and other "rational" views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other "irrational" views had ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)

Paul Feyerabend
Early Chinese thinkers had taken variety at face value. They had favored diversification and collected anomalies instead of trying to explain them away.

Paul Feyerabend
Mathematical Reasoning is not only exact; it has its own criteria of reality

Paul Feyerabend
Most scientists today are devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes "scientific progress" in many areas.

Paul Feyerabend