Feyerabend and Popper

The relations between Popper and Feyerabend have been carefully reconstructed by a few scholars, but the question about the influence of the former on the latter has not yet found convergent answers. According to this paper, Feyerabend was a pupil of Popper’s, because he deals with typically Popperian topics and develops themes that share a Popperian imprint. At the same time, however, Feyerabend was not a true disciple, for he took the central tenets of critical rationalism to their extreme consequences, distorting them to some degree, and making them alien to very nature of Popper’s philosophy, if not altogether incompatible with it. In order to support this interpretation, the author examines two themes common to both philosophers: the reappraisal of metaphysics and the relationship between science and rationality. As far as metaphysics is concerned, Feyerabend, unlike Popper, believes that a demarcation criterion between science and metaphysics is not necessary because Feyerabend’s conception of science and of rationality is different from Popper’s one. Indeed, while for Popper science is the paradigm of rational discussion, for Feyerabend science, like any other human product, is the result of intuition and imagination no less than of reasoning.