I first read Feyerabend in the early seventies but his philosophy was frowned on by the scientistic philosophy department I was studying in, which was dominated first by the analytic philosophers and then by the Althusserians. Towards the end of the seventies the dominant philosophy was becoming « postmodern », in the bad sense of forms of social constructivism and linguistic idealism,under the sway of Lacan and Derrida.
So I moved to Paris to see if the French philosophers were really as irrationalist and as constructivist as described. No, I found, they were realist, rationalist, and pro-science. I could have moved to Zurich and studied under Feyerabend, but I thought that there was something undevelopped in his pluralism. Feyerabend’s thought was stunted by the lack of a favourable intellectual context. He was continually involved in polemics, trying to correct misreadings and misunderstandings.
So I think I made the right choice to push my pluralism forward by coming to France.
AGENT SWARM 