Summary
Feyerabend discloses that he did not keep any careful records of his life and destroyed much of the documentation autobiographers usually preserve, including a family album discarded "to make room for what I then thought were more important books", and correspondences ("even from Nobel Prize winners"). The book relies on Feyerabends's own memory as well as the various stray sources that he did manage to keep. His personal and intellectual experiences and his romantic and artistic adventures comprise roughly half the book. He recounts how he survived the depressions and suicide of his mother, his bare survival of World War II as an officer in the Wehrmacht, and his forgone apprenticeship as a tenor to Bertolt Brecht. His stormy relationships with philosophical luminaries such as mentor Karl Popper, friend and colleague Imre Lakatos and department chair of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley John Searle are described in lurid anecdotes. The book contains ruminations on the themes of evil, compassion and anti-Semitism.
Read more about this topic: Killing Time (book)
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