100 Books Like The End Of Science

I like that this book dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical.

Basically, the claim is that North American pragmatic values have substituted classical intellectual European ones, contributing to the present-day degeneracy of science and culture and society in general, with special emphasis on the history of physics of the last century.

I think there are some truths among the ideas presented in this book. However, Unzicker’s hope is to “Make Physics Great Again,” mimicking the discourse of Donald Trump (replacing the word “America” with “Physics”), and I cannot see a future in which America or physics will be the same as they were in the past. 

I find useful some of the advice for researchers given in this book by José Luis Pérez Velázquez, a Spanish biologist and researcher based in the United States.

As the title indicates, it is a pessimistic view on the business of research nowadays, a pessimistic panorama where science is converted into a business of how to get funds from States, and the highest status scientists dedicate most of their time to administration and management rather than doing science.

I appreciate his honest advice for those who love true science to be apart from high-rank positions and enjoy science from a position away from the responsibility and bureaucracy.

There is a criticism of science in the discourses of philosophers of science, but it is usually detached from contact with the real problems that scientists worry about. There are some valuable rare exceptions, such as this work by Gillies.

I like this text because it enters into the real sociological problems of science nowadays beyond abstract epistemological theories. For instance, it enters into detail on the reasons why academics move into administration and management as a way to increase their professional status and in order to hide their lack of new ideas and boring research work. 

I think its force resides in its attempt to understand the engines of history without falling into the metaphysical idealist speculations of other previous philosophers, like Hegel.

I do not agree with all of Spengler’s statements, but I consider his book to be a masterpiece in many ways, a very recommendable book, with plenty of lucid ideas and an admirable global vision.

He is a a giant, a brave thinker with a strong character and something interesting to tell, rather than a boring treatise of trivialities and diplomatic sentences of the kind so common among our dwarf philosophers.

As a circular economy professional from Cambridge university, I pursue to cross that bridge between life sciences and organizational theory.

Capra and Luisi provide exactly that. Their synthesis of systems thinking, complexity theory, and living systems research gives us the conceptual foundation for understanding why organizations function best when mimicking natural characteristics.

I was especially moved by their argument that the mechanistic worldview dominating business for centuries is not just outdated but actively harmful. They show how living systems operate through networks of relationships rather than hierarchies, through emergence rather than control, through continuous adaptation rather than static structures.

Every time I work with an organization struggling with rigid hierarchies or siloed thinking, I draw on frameworks from this book. Their chapter on cognition and consciousness in living systems shifted how I think about organizational learning.

This is dense material, but they write with such clarity that complex concepts become… show more.

Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding the justification of induction are taken as a point of departure, followed by a consideration of a variety of traditional and contemporary ways of dealing with this problem. 

The author then sets forth his own criteria of adequacy for interpretations of probability. Utilizing these criteria, he analyzes contemporary theories of probability, as well as the older classical and subjective interpretations.

This is a collection of essays by Kuhn, written later in his life, as he tried to clarify and develop the view he initially presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn reflects on developments in the sociology of science that were influenced by his work, as the Strong Programme sociologists of science identified as Kuhnians and relativists.  Kuhn tries to clarify what he meant by “paradigm change”, motivated by a concern to address his critics and to distance his own view from certain types of relativist views.

The autobiographical interview is very engaging, as Kuhn takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of his book, as well as on the effects the book has had on his life and career. I think much of what Kuhn had to say in these later papers provides important insight into understanding science, especially his remarks on scientific specialization.

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

I really like this book and I regularly use it as a textbook in my Introduction to the Philosophy of Science course.

What I like is the way that Losee uses very short case studies in the history of science to refute the popular view that, through experimentation and observation, nature decides between competing theories and provides the justification for replacing an older theory with a new one. Although Losee does not always agree with Kuhn, I find that his book beautifully complements the history-based argument in Kuhn’s book, and both are short!

Bookshelves groan under the weight of highly skilled science communicators, and through them those of us with no specialist knowledge can learn about evolution, quantum mechanics, neuroscience et al, and then bore people to death with our newfound knowledge. There is, however, a world of difference between the things science discovers and the stories we tell about these discoveries. I love this book because it makes the reader do the hard yards, thinking not just about the breathless new discoveries, but also the very nature of this knowledge, and hence its limits.