Tightrope-Walking Rationality: Feyerabend’s Metanarrative

Abstract

Many philosophers have found the early Feyerabend’s philosophy, of the fifties and early to mid-sixties, as defensible and rational. (See, for example, Couvalis, 1989, and Preston, 1997a) But very few philosophers have attempted to defend the later Feyerabend of the seventies and after.¹ Preston, for example, describes Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism as a ‘stinkbomb’ and unequivocally dismisses the importance and rationality of the later Feyerabend. Moreover, Preston perceives Feyerabend’s career as a relentless slide from promising, realistic, beginnings, passing through the anarchistic ‘stinkbomb’ phase, and eventually ending in the mire of relativism and ‘post-modernism’.