Here are 100 books that Understanding Philosophy of Science fans have personally recommended if you like
Understanding Philosophy of Science.
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I was once an academic philosopher, but I found it too glamorous and well-paid so I became a novelist and private intellectual mentor instead. I wroteYou Are Herebecause I love whatscience knows, but an interest in howscience knows drew me into the philosophy of science, where a puzzle lurks. Scientists claim that the essence of their craft is captured in a 17th Century formula, “the scientific method”... and in a 20th Century litmus test, “falsifiability.” Philosophers claim that these two ideas are (a) both nonsense and (b) in any case mutually contradictory. So what’s going on?
Where and why did the modern idea of “thescientific method” show up? The somewhat disturbing answer is that it emerged from highly rhetorical attempts—mainly in one U.S. pop sci magazine in the early twentieth century—to distance wonderful “science” (in its modern sense, which was invented in the 1870s) from anything merely humanistic. The details of this hidden history leave you with the vertiginous sense that the very words we use in this area—science, rational, evidence, know—constitute a kind of fog of evidence-free non-rational assumptions.
The surprising history of the scientific method-from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps-and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century.
The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking.
The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field,…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
My fascination with the Universe led me to become a high-energy physics and astrophysics researcher. I work at CERN (Geneva) working on elementary particles. Over many years, I have written and reviewed numerous scientific articles and served as the editor for two books. I have also reviewed books and co-written a few short popular science pieces. My reading interests encompass not only academic and literary works but also popular science, philosophy, and sociology. Understanding the Universe is difficult. With this collection, I hope to provide you with an authentic introduction to the study of the Universe and its evolution from various perspectives.
This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.
I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.
I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism.
In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy.
Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.
In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice,…
I have spent my entire adult life wondering if my world would be different if I hadn’t spent my teens and twenties on antidepressants. What I know for sure is that the person I am after psychiatric drugs is wildly different than the person I was while medicated, which has led me down a path of understanding the history and cultural significance of psychiatric drugs to understand my own story. Now, I am an advocate for safe psychiatric drug deprescribing education. My goal is to teach patients and parents how to ask their doctors the right questions, encourage true informed consent, and make prescribers aware of the signs and symptoms of over-medication and psychiatric drug withdrawal.
A book about pharmaceutical corruption and manipulative science can rarely make me laugh out loud, but Bad Science does just that.
Not only did the book make me a better advocate for my health by teaching me what red flags to look out for in research and shady science journalism, but it kept me consistently entertained to the point where I was disappointed when the book ended. It should be required reading in all high school science classes.
Have you ever wondered how one day the media can assert that alcohol is bad for us and the next unashamedly run a story touting the benefits of daily alcohol consumption? Or how a drug that is pulled off the market for causing heart attacks ever got approved in the first place? How can average readers, who aren't medical doctors or Ph.D.s in biochemistry, tell what they should be paying attention to and what's, well, just more bullshit?
Ben Goldacre has made a point of exposing quack doctors and nutritionists, bogus credentialing programs, and biased scientific studies. He has also…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I was once an academic philosopher, but I found it too glamorous and well-paid so I became a novelist and private intellectual mentor instead. I wroteYou Are Herebecause I love whatscience knows, but an interest in howscience knows drew me into the philosophy of science, where a puzzle lurks. Scientists claim that the essence of their craft is captured in a 17th Century formula, “the scientific method”... and in a 20th Century litmus test, “falsifiability.” Philosophers claim that these two ideas are (a) both nonsense and (b) in any case mutually contradictory. So what’s going on?
Few people have ideas of world-shattering originality; fewer still explain them in prose so limpid that the rest of us can follow the argument. I love receiving that gift in almost anything I read by Galileo. His writing also reminds us at every turn that great science—as his art much later came to be called—depends not just on those trite "observe, hypothesise, collect data..." recipes but, crucially, on thinking creatively about concepts. There's a man in full here, too: almost supernaturally brilliant, but also witty, defensive, cutting, proud, delighted, fearful, irascible. Of all people, of all time, he's on my top ten "wish I could have met" list.
'Philosophy is written in this great book which is continually open before our eyes - I mean the universe...'
Galileo's astronomical discoveries changed the way we look at the world, and our place in the universe. Threatened by the Inquisition for daring to contradict the literal truth of the Bible, Galileo ignited a scientific revolution when he asserted that the Earth moves. This generous selection from his writings contains all the essential texts for a reader to appreciate his lasting significance. Mark Davie's new translation renders Galileo's vigorous Italian prose into clear modern English, while William R. Shea's version of…
I’ve been a philosopher before I knew what philosophers were: asking questions to challenge the starting points for conversations. My biggest pet peeve has always been people who were sure they entirely understood something. While scientists conduct science to help learn about the world, philosophers of science like me study science to try to figure out how it works, why (and when) it’s successful, and how it relates to human concerns and society. Humans ultimately invent science, and I think it’s fascinating to consider how its features relate to our interests and foibles and how it’s so successful at producing knowledge and practical abilities.
This book takes what seems to be an incredibly basic feature of the world—temperature—and shows how a tremendous amount of scientific ingenuity and choices made over two centuries contributed to defining and measuring temperatures.
Showing how concepts taken for granted today emerged over time and could have been different helps reveal how little of what we know comes from direct observation.
What is temperature, and how can we measure it correctly? These may seem like simple questions, but the most renowned scientists struggled with them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In Inventing Temperature, Chang examines how scientists first created thermometers; how they measured temperature beyond the reach of standard thermometers; and how they managed to assess the reliability and accuracy of these instruments without a circular reliance on the instruments themselves.
In a discussion that brings together the history of science with the philosophy of science, Chang presents the simple yet challenging epistemic and technical questions about these instruments, and…
Having majored in both philosophy and physics as an undergraduate, I specialized in the philosophy of science in graduate school–with a focus on the possibility of a “logic of scientific discovery.” Most philosophers of science have been skeptical about such a sub-discipline, restricting their theories of scientific method to the justification of already-formulated hypotheses. Others (including myself) have held that there is also a logic to the generation of hypotheses.
This book begins with Kuhn's statement of his position followed by seven essays offering criticism and analysis, and finally by Kuhn's reply. It will interest senior undergraduates and graduate students of the philosophy and history of science, as well as professional philosophers, philosophically inclined scientists, and some psychologists and sociologists.
This collection provided an update to the wide reaction to Kuhn’s 1962 book by others in this field of inquiry, beginning and ending with essays by Kuhn himself.
Two books have been particularly influential in contemporary philosophy of science: Karl R. Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both agree upon the importance of revolutions in science, but differ about the role of criticism in science's revolutionary growth. This volume arose out of a symposium on Kuhn's work, with Popper in the chair, at an international colloquium held in London in 1965. The book begins with Kuhn's statement of his position followed by seven essays offering criticism and analysis, and finally by Kuhn's reply. The book will interest senior undergraduates and graduate…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
As a boy, I loved reading about science and technology and became a physicist. To my surprise, I found myself increasingly drawn to studying the history of science and philosophy of science, which attempts to understand how and why science “works.” I resigned from my job as a physicist and devoted myself to full-time graduate study in this field, enjoying every moment of it. I began a forty-nine-year academic career—the last thirty-nine at Lehigh University—teaching courses of my own design in the history and philosophy of science and also in how science, technology, and society mutually influence one another. I can honestly say that I remain excited even now about attempting to understand how scientific knowledge impacts society.
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!
In a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Cullen Murphy wrote that "It is always a little disconcerting when audacious scientific theories come a cropper." In this case, he was speaking of Stephen Hawking's now self-repudiated idea that information swallowed by cosmic black holes might be escaping into "baby universes." John Losee looks at the subject of rejected scientific theories through an analysis of case studies from more than two centuries of science. Losee excerpts the work of prominent scientists and philosophers of science accompanied by evaluative comments from the fields of science and philosophy. He sets these discussions within…
I’m an educator at heart and have been teaching in high schools for over thirty years now. I get a kick out of helping young people see the world anew and think about ideas in ways that at first seem strange and challenging to them, both in the classroom and through my novels. Of course, to be any good at that, I have to be inquisitive and open myself, and there’s nothing like the topic of consciousness to make you feel feeble-minded and ill-informed. It’s such a wondrous topic because it sits at the precise meeting point of so many of our scientific, cultural, artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions.
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.
Co-published with the University of Queensland Press. HPC holds rights in North America and U. S. Dependencies.
Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars.
In addition to overall improvements and updates inspired by Chalmers's experience as a teacher, comments from his readers, and recent developments in the field, this fourth edition features an extensive chapter-long postscript that draws on his research into the history of…
Being a creative person, I studied design to make the world better… only to realise that great ideas and designs often falter because we hold ourselves back by the way we think. I had to study philosophy to understand what is limiting us. And then I left my own design work behind to study the practices expert creatives (like top design professionals) have developed to get past these roadblocks. Having discovered how they can create new frames, time and time again, it has become my mission to empower other people to do this – not only on a project level, but taking these practices to the organizational sector and societal transformation.
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!
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standing…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Apart from my professional expertise as a philosopher, I have directly observed science by working as a professional researcher in Physics and Astronomy. In any field, either arts, science, humanities, literature,... I observe the same thing: decline, ugliness, lack of spirit, lack of great intellectual achievements, and stupidity. Of course, we have technology, medicine, engineering, the Internet, and material things… and they are better than ever, but our culture and spirit are dying. Science is part of this culture, which is also in decadence, and working as a scientist and reading Spengler is a good combination to realize it.
In my opinion, Horgan’s book is of great value, and I find it an important reference in considering the subject of “the end of science.”
This book is brave and lucid, with plenty of good ideas on topics related to the limits of knowledge in science. The intuition that the scientific age is declining is prophetic, I guess, but not so the causes Horgan gives. It is possible the limits of knowledge is one of the causes, but there is much more behind the twilight of science, and I think it is more related to being sated with knowledge rather than to the limits of knowledge.
It is more a sociological/anthropological question than a pure debate about whether there remain scientific problems to be solved.
In The End of Science, John Horgan makes the case that the era of truly profound scientific revelations about the universe and our place in it is over. Interviewing scientific luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, he demonstrates that all the big questions that can be answered have been answered, as science bumps up against fundamental limits. The world cannot give us a "theory of everything," and modern endeavors such as string theory are "ironic" and "theological" in nature, not scientific, because they are impossible to confirm. Horgan's argument was controversial in 1996, and it remains…
