[17] His multifaceted personality is eloquently summarized in his obituary by Ian Hacking: "Humanists, in my old-fashioned sense, need to be part of both arts and sciences.

By strengthening intra and inter-community solidarity, it strives to improve local capacities, promote the respect of human rights, and sustain cultural and biological diversity."

'[22] His father, originally from Carinthia, was an officer in the merchant marine in World War I in Istria and a civil servant in Vienna until he died due to complications from a stroke.

The family lived in a working-class neighborhood (Wolfganggasse) where gypsy musicians, over-the-top relatives, illusionists, sudden accidents, and heated quarrels were part of everyday life.

In his autobiography Feyerabend remembers a childhood in which magic and mysterious events were separated by dreary 'commonplace' only by a slight change of perspective[23] — a theme later found in his work.

The mayor of Apolda gave him a job in the education sector and he, then still on two crutches, worked in public entertainment including writing speeches, dialogues, and plays.

[37] A possible reason was Feyerabend's instinctive aversion to group thinking, which, for instance, made him staunchly refuse joining any Marxist Leninist organizations despite having friends there and despite voting communist in the early Austrian election.

[37] In Vienna, Feyerabend organized the Kraft Circle, where students and faculty discussed scientific theories (he recalled five meetings about non-Einsteinian interpretations of the Lorentz transformations)[38] and often focused on the problem of the existence of the external world.

In 1955, Feyerabend successfully applied for a lectureship at the University of Bristol with letters of reference[45] from Karl Popper and Erwin Schrödinger and started his academic career.

[46] After presenting a paper on the measurement problem at the 1957 symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol, Feyerabend was invited to the University of Minnesota by Michael Scriven.

[48] 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",[49] and Alfred Tarski, among others.

[51] 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.

"We have to learn how to think," they said, as if logic has anything to do with that.While teaching at the London School of Economics, Imre Lakatos often 'jumped in' during Feyerabend's lectures and started defending rationalist arguments.

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.

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.

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").

Feyerabend argues that von Neumann's 'no-go' proof only shows that the Copenhagen interpretation is consistent with the fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics but it does not logically follow from them.

Against this, Feyerabend claims that Bohr was a pluralist who attempting to pursue a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics (the Bohr-Kramer-Slater conjecture) but abandoned it due to its conflict with the Bothe-Geiger and Compton-Simon experiments.

The use of the phrase 'opportunism' comes from Einstein[91] which denotes an inquirer who changes their beliefs and techniques to fit the situation at hand, rather than pre-judge individual events with well-defined methods or convictions.

Is it not possible that an objective approach that frowns upon personal connections between the entities examined will harm people, turn them into miserable, unfriendly, self-righteous mechanisms without charm or humour?

It offers resistance; some constructions (some incipient cultures - cargo cults, for example) find no point of attack in it and simply collapse"[100] This leads Feyerabend to defend the disunity of the world thesis that was articulated by many members of the Stanford School.

Along with a number of mid-20th century philosophers (most notably, Wilfrid Sellars, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Richard Rorty), Feyerabend was influential in the development of eliminative materialism, a radical position in the philosophy of mind.

[109] Starting from the argument that a historical universal scientific method does not exist, Feyerabend argues that science does not deserve its privileged status in western society.

[114] Feyerabend thought that scientific expertise was partially exaggerated by needless uses of jargon and technical language[115] and that many contributions towards science were made by laypeople.

The crank usually is content with defending the point of view in its original, undeveloped, metaphysical form, and he is not prepared to test its usefulness in all those cases which seem to favor the opponent, or even admit that there exists a problem.

Someone who believes in flat earth theory, climate change denial, or astrology – for example – are not necessarily cranks, depending on how they defend those beliefs from criticism.

In the Iliad, and elsewhere, Feyerabend interprets Homer as accepting the view that the universe is subdivided into parts with different laws and qualitative features that do not aggregate into a unified whole.

[131] His arguments for pluralism moved the topic into the mainstream[132] and his use of historical case studies were influential in the development of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) as an independent discipline.

Feyerabend's work was also influential for several physicists who felt empowered to experiment with approaches different from those of their supervisors as well on many social scientists who were under great pressure to conform to the 'standards' of the natural sciences.

[141] For the centennial of Feyerabend's birth, in 2024, there was a series of conferences, workshops, publications, experimental art, song recitals, and theatre pieces planned in honor of his life and works.