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The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend

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Paul Feyerabend
Age: 70 †
Born: 1924
Born: January 13
Died: 1994
Died: February 11
Philosopher
University Teacher
Vienna
Austria
P. K. Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend
Principles
Science
Doe
Anything
Inhibit
Principle
Progress
Goes

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Rationalism... is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God.
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A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it.
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My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.
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In a war a totalitarian state has a free hand.
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An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice and so on).
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Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.
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Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.
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The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
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I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.
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All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
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Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.
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Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.
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Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
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Given any rule, however �fundamental� or �necessary� for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.
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What is surprising is that almost all the trends that developed within the sciences, Aristotelianism and an extreme Platonism included, produced results, not only in special domains, but everywhere there exist highly theoretical branches of biology and highly empirical parts of astrophysics. The world is a complex an many-sided thing.
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Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise.
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Events and developments, such as ... the Copernican Revolution, ... occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound by certain obvious methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.
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Humane science must be adapted to the requirements of a balanced and rewarding life.
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So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.
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One knows quite well that harmony can be a harmony of appearances.
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