Editing Paul Feyerabend (section)

===Berkeley, Zurich and retirement===
[[File:Paul Feyerabend 2.jpg|thumb|250px|Feyerabend later in life. Photograph by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend]]
Feyerabend's primary academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. While he was hired there in 1958, he spent part of his first years in the United States at the University of Minnesota, working closely with [[Herbert Feigl]] and [[Paul Meehl]] after rejecting a job offer from [[Cornell University]].{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=115}} In California, he met and befriended [[Rudolf Carnap]], whom he described as a "wonderful person, gentle, understanding, not at all as dry as would appear from some (not all) of his writings",{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|pp=119-120}} and [[Alfred Tarski]], among others. He also married for a third time. At Berkeley, Feyerabend mostly lectured on general philosophy and philosophy of science. During the student revolution, he also lectured on revolutionaries ([[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]], [[Mao]], [[John Stuart Mill|Mill]], and [[Daniel Cohn-Bendit|Cohn-Bendit]]).{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=123}} He often invited students and outsiders, including [[Lenny Bruce]] and [[Malcolm X]], to guest lecture on a variety of issues including [[gay rights]], [[racism]], and [[witchcraft]]. He supported the students but did not support student strikes. [[John Searle]] attempted to get Feyerabend fired from his position for hosting lectures off-campus.{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=126}}  

As Feyerabend was highly marketable in academia and personally restless, he kept accepting and leaving university appointments while holding more 'stable' positions in Berkeley and London. For instance, starting in 1968, he spent two terms at Yale, which he describes as boring, feeling that most there did not have "ideas of their own."{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=134}} There, however, he did meet [[Jeffrey Bub]], and the two became friends. He remembered attempting to give everyone in graduate seminars 'As', which was strongly resisted by the students at Yale.  He also asked students in his undergraduate classes to build something useful, like furniture or short films, rather than term papers or exams.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Feyerabend: Killing Time at Yale |url=https://www.iqoqi-vienna.at/blogs/blog/feyerabend-killing-time-at-yale |website=www.iqoqi-vienna.at}}</ref> In the same years, he accepted a new chair in philosophy of science in Berlin and a professorship in Auckland (New Zealand). In Berlin, he faced a 'problem' as he was assigned two secretaries, fourteen assistants and an impressive office with antique furniture and an anteroom, which "gave him the willies":     

{{blockquote|“...I wrote and mailed my own letters, including official ones ...  never had a mailing list or any list of  my publications, and I threw away most of the offprints that were sent to me... That took me out of the academic landscape, but it also simplified my life. ... [In Berlin] the secretaries were soon used  by my less independent colleagues and by the assistants. "Look," I said to them, "I was given 80,000 marks for starting a new library; go and buy all the books you want and run as many seminars as you like. Don't ask me-- be independent!". Most of the assistants were revolutionaries, and two of them were sought by the police. Yet, they didn't buy Che Guevara or Mao, or Lenin; they bought books on logic! "We have to learn how to think," they said, as if logic has anything to do with that.|From his autobiography, ''[[Killing Time (autobiography)|Killing Time]]'', p 132}}

While teaching at the London School of Economics, [[Imre Lakatos]] often 'jumped in' during Feyerabend's lectures and started defending rationalist arguments. The two "differed in outlook, character and ambitions"  but became very close friends. They often met at Lakatos' luxurious house in Turner Woods, which included an impressive library. Lakatos had bought the house for representation purposes and Feyerabend often made gentle fun of it, choosing to help Lakatos' wife to wash dishes after dinner rather than engaging in scholarly debates with 'important guests' in the library. "Don't worry" – Imre would say to his guests – "Paul is an anarchist".{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|pp=128-130}} Lakatos and Feyerabend planned to write a dialogue volume in which Lakatos would defend a rationalist view of science and Feyerabend would attack it. This planned joint publication was put to an end by Lakatos's sudden death in 1974. Feyerabend was devastated by it.   
[[File:Feyerabend, Kuhn, Hoyningen-Huene and colleagues after seminar at ETH Zurich.jpg|left|thumb|220x220px|Feyerabend, Kuhn, Hoyningen-Huene and colleagues after a seminar at ETH Zurich]]
Feyerabend had become more and more aware of the limitation of theories – no matter how well conceived – compared with the detailed, idiosyncratic issues encountered in the course of scientific practice. The "poverty of abstract philosophical reasoning" became one of the "feelings" that motivated him to pull together the collage of observations and ideas that he had conceived for the project with Imre Lakatos, whose first edition was published in 1975 as [[Against Method]].{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|pp=139-152}} Feyerabend added to it some outrageous passages and terms, including about an 'anarchistic theory of knowledge', for the sake of provocation and in memory of Imre. He mostly wanted to encourage attention to scientific practice and common sense rather than to the empty 'clarifications' of logicians, but his views were not appreciated by the intellectuals who were then directing traffic in the philosophical community, who tended to isolate him.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Shaw |first1=Jamie. |last2=Bschir |first2=Karim |date=2021 |title=Introduction: Paul Feyerabend's Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century |journal=Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays |language=en |pages=1–10}}</ref>  Against Method also suggested that "approaches not tied to scientific institutions" may have value, and that scientists should work under the control of the larger public-- views not appreciated by all scientists either. Some gave him the dubious fame of 'worst enemy of science'.{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=146}} Moreover, Feyerabend was aware that "scientific jargon" – read literally, world for word, could reveal not only "nonsense", as found out by [[J. L. Austin|John Austin]], "but also inhumanity.  With the Dadaists Feyerabend realized that "the language of philosophers, politicians, theologians" had similarities with "brute in-articulations".  He exposed that by "avoiding scholarly ways of presenting a view" and using "common locutions and the language of show business and pulp instead".{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|pp=143-144}}   

In his autobiography, Feyerabend describes how the community of 'intellectuals' seemed to "...take a slight interest in me, lift me up to his own eye level, took a brief look at me, and drop me again. After making me appear more important than I ever thought I was, it enumerated my shortcomings and put me back on my place."{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=147}} This treatment left him all but indifferent. During the years following the publication of Against Method and the critical reviews that followed – some of which as scathing as superficial – he suffered from bouts of ill health and [[depression (mood)|depression]]. While medical doctors could not do anything for him, some help came from alternative therapies (e.g., Chinese herbal medicines, acupuncture, diet, massage). He also kept moving among academic appointments (Auckland, Brighton, Kassel).   

Towards the end of the 1970s, Feyerabend was assigned a position as Professor of Philosophy at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. There, he ran well attended lectures, including on the ''[[Theaetetus (dialogue)|Theaetetus]]'', [[Timaeus (dialogue)|''Timeaus'']], and [[Aristotelian physics|Aristotle's physics]] as well as public debates and seminars for the non-academic public. Through the 1980s, he enjoyed alternating between posts at ETH Zurich and UC Berkeley. In 1983, he also met Grazia Borrini, who would become his fourth and final wife.{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=165}} She heard of Feyerabend from train passengers in Europe and attended his seminar in Berkeley. They were married in 1989, when they both decided to try to have children, for which they needed medical assistance due to Feyerabend's war injury.{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=167}} Feyerabend claims that he finally understood the meaning of love because of Grazia. This had a dramatic impact on his worldview ("Today it seems to me that love and friendship play a central role and that without them even the noblest achievements and the most fundamental principles remain pale, empty and dangerous").{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=173}} It is also in those years that he developed what he describes as "...a trace of a moral character”.{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=174}} 

{{blockquote|“...a moral character cannot be created by argument, 'education' or an act of will. It cannot be created by any kind of planned action, whether scientific, political, moral or religious. Like true love, it is a gift, not an achievement. It depends on accidents, such as parental affection, some kind of stability, friendship, and-- following therefrom--  on a delicate balance between self-confidence  and concern for others. We can create conditions that favor the balance; we cannot create the balance itself. Guilt, responsibility, obligation-- these ideas make sense when the balance is given. They are empty words, even obstacles, when it is lacking.” |From his autobiography, ''[[Killing Time (autobiography)|Killing Time]]'', p 174}}
[[File:Us then.jpg|thumb|Paul Feyerabend and Grazia Borrini Feyerabend (Crete, 1980s)|220x220px]]
In 1989, Feyerabend voluntarily left Berkeley for good. After his mandatory retirement also from Zurich, in 1990, he continued to give lectures, including often in Italy, published papers and book reviews for ''Common Knowledge'', and worked on his posthumously released ''[[Conquest of Abundance]]'' and on his [[Killing Time (autobiography)|autobiography]]-- the volumes for which writing became for him "a 'pleasurable activity', almost like composing a work of art".{{sfn|Feyerabend|1995|p=163}}  He remained based in Meilen, in Switzerland, but often spent time with his wife in Rome. After a short period of suffering from an inoperable [[brain tumor]], he died in 1994 at the [[Genolier|Genolier Clinic]], overlooking [[Lake Geneva|Lake Geneva, Switzerland]].  He had just turned 70.  He is buried in his family grave, in Vienna.