Paul Feyerabend
“Anything goes!”
“gSehgih ihrg hregveri sreuhbgu!”
“I didn't mean it, you illiterate bastard!”
Paul Feyerabend was a Swedish philosopher who was born, raised and schooled in Austria. He was a satirist with a love of irony, jokes and insults. He was also prominent anti-multiculturalist and an equally prominent pro-multicosmologist. He had a wife named Kuhn Feyerabend, and two children, Lakatos Feyerabend (6yrs old) and Popper Feyerabend (85 yrs old). But the children died in a tragic accident when, in a fit of rage, Feyerabend forced them to eat a pound of his wife’s solid cocaine, which he mistook for soap, because they lied about the length of their school rulers. Since then he has been on a tragic quest to prove he isn't mentally retarded.
Conversation with Illiterates[edit]
Feyerabend is best known for his “Conversations with Illiterates” , a series of dialogues with random illiterates, in which he would poke fun at their incapacity to read Hamlet to demonstrate his intellectual superiority to the world. However, due to everyone being dumb but Feyerabend, no one was capable of reading the book. This lack of controversy eventually took its toll on Feyerabend, resulting in a year of depression.
| “ | “The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen -- Is it here or isn't? No sign of it. Perhaps it's asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV -Good Morning America-, David What's-his-name, a guy I can't stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. I manage to laugh at their inability to read the cue cards. Then it hits me: they’re too dumb to understand I’m laughing at them -and here she is, my faithful depression: "Did you think you could live without me?" Feyerabend writing in his autobiography, Killing Time |
” |
Against Method[edit]
The depression faded when it came to Feyerabend that because no one could read, he could write what he wanted and be conceived a genius on the merit of his writing capability alone. With this came his infamous maxim - “anything goes!”
His first foray into intellectual showmanship was the book “Against Method”, where he argued that the methods of voodoo are as valuable as the methods of science precisely because there are no unlimited methods. He wrote some other tosh too about multiculturalism and science in a free society - “you’re all equal; equally stupid. Don’t let the white scientist tell you otherwise!” - but this was his only really good book; soon afterward, he died of a brain tumour, so that is to be expectant.