Feyerabend among Popperians, 1948-1978

Abstract Did I have a fitting piece for a volume in memory of Paul Feyerabend? Well, apart from a newspaper obituary/ I had just one piece devoted exclusively to him. Was it fitting? Not exactly; but a scene-setting introduction might help. Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper took a shine to each other when they first met, at the Austrian College in Alpbach, in 1948. Paul told me long afterward that they went for a walk, with Popper talking very easily, on a first-name basis, and he was impressed by the simplicity of Popper’s arguments. However, in Vienna Feyerabend fell under Elizabeth Anscombe’s influence; through her he briefly met Wittgenstein; and when he got a British Council Scholarship in 1951, he applied to study under him. But Wittgenstein died in April, and in 1952 Feyerabend came to LSE to work under Popper on problems relating to quantum mechanics. It must have been then that he began to develop his fluent, racy style in both spoken and written English. But although I was teaching at LSE I don’t remember meeting him then. (He afterward translated Popper’s The Open Society into German.) I met him when he briefly passed through Alpbach en route to Berkeley in 1958, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind him. But it was not until 1961, when I and my family visited Berkeley, that I got to know him at all well.