Paul Feyerabend was born in Vienna on 13 January 1924. He studied physics, astronomy, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate there in 1951. From 1951 to 1956, he lectured at the Wiener Institut für Wissenschaft und Schöne Künste. In 1955, he was given a position as a lecturer at the University of Bristol. From 1958 until his retirement in 1990 he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, first as a visiting professor, then as professor and, finally, starting in 1962, as chair. During this time, he accepted numerous visiting professorships as well as tenured professorships at other universities. Between 1980 and 1990, he split his time between his chair at the University of California at Berkeley and the ETH Zurich. Feyerabend died on 11 February 1994 in Genolier in French-speaking Switzerland.
Feyerabend is among the most influential philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, he, along with Thomas S. Kuhn, was principally involved in driving forward a new and modern philosophy of science as we know it.
The collection is composed of 226 folders containing approx. 120 sheets each. Included are manuscripts, letters, private documents and special prints. In addition to this, the collection is also home to his reference library of approx. 2,600 volumes, many of which were annotated and underlined by Feyerabend. The books have been catalogued as part of the university library’s collections. The collection has been catalogued in full (Search the collections).