Against Method

This book by Paul Feyerabend is one of the most important and certainly the most radical books of philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. It forms almost a perfect sequel to Thomas Kuhn's book in the same field - only, where Kuhn gave us an objective "what happens and how" of revolutions in scientific fields, Feyerabend here gives us a more subjective "what could maybe happen, and how to do it". To use a comparative metaphor, Kuhn wrote of scientific revolution like Marx wrote of its socio-economic equivalent, while Feyerabend writes of it like Che Guevara, chock full of grassroots incitement to properly-informed action and ample tactical advice (using Galileo's career as prime example).

   I won't go into depth with a summary of what he talks about in this book as it spans a huge arena of the history of science, its present and future capacities, and the dynamics at play in determining what we may consider progress in all of this. To give a very brief summary of the main point of the text though, I will say that Feyerabend sees the only sustainably trustworthy epistemological approach to science as that of anarchism. That is to say, when approaching theory, fact, experiment, and so on, the only reasonable guideline to guarantee that progress can intuit itself into the field's grasp on its object is: "anything goes." I like this a lot. It's a healthy reminder that even the most open-minded empiricists can, and do, get bogged down in the accumulation of the best thinking of all the open-minded empiricists who came before them, and thus often cease being effective open-minded empiricists. Epistemological anarchism is an approach that rightly inspires terror in the hearts of academics who have devoted their careers to the minutiae of issues under particular paradigms; however as an approach deigning to liberate and guarantee the continual advancement of any kind of knowledge, it's very difficult to argue with given how unpredictable are the paradigm shifts in any given field of study.

   If you're interested in the philosophy of science I'm going to assume that you've already read this, but if you're merely a scientist who has given relatively little thought to the epistemological conditions of your work, I'd highly recommend this if you want a revolutionary energising shock.

the Lord of the Rings: book two

This book by J.R.R. Tolkien is one I've read for this blog in the last few years, hence the link going back to that post - I'm re-experiencing the series in audio form read a chapter a week by the delightful Tolkien Trash, which I'm still very much enjoying. Check out her channel for some of the best Tolkien-related content YouTube has to offer.

the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book by Thomas Kuhn is probably the most significant work in the philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. In it, Kuhn skips around the history of scientific endeavour to sketch a theory of how progress in these fields happens. Science of a particular era subsists in what he calls a paradigm, a collectively-agreed-upon web of assumptions, problems and techniques that define the scope and limits of the field at that time. It is only when a particular paradigm begins to encounter anomalies that it is unequipped to explain, and thus enters a period of crisis, that hitherto unthought-of methods and speculations emerge, and thus a scientific revolution (think Copernicus overturning the Ptolemaic astronomical system, or Einstein going so far beyond Newton that the previously accepted physics became a redundant rump) takes place - the paradigm shifts, and new modes of understanding become possible, new questions become salient, and new experiments become required to continue advancing the frontiers of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this book was - I'm interested in science but don't read much of it as I find myself either feeling alienated by the abundance of jargon or patronized by the author's obvious overcompensations in avoiding jargon, but Kuhn avoids both extremes and explores this whole nest of topics in an accessible and enlightening way. Absolutely highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Titanicus

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Dan Abnett - yes, I know, another one. He's my fave, what can I say. Only this one doesn't revolve around the plucky Imperial Guard or morally-questionable Inquisitors; this one is about the Titan Legions themselves. The god-machines - walking cathedrals of destruction.* I'd been aware of this novel when it came out seventeen years ago, but simply wasn't that excited about it - I mean, Titans are so ridiculously big and overpowered that how can you have any serious stakes in a story about them? Turns out I was wrong. The way you have serious stakes in a story about Titans is by A) making the enemy have even more Titans than the good guys and B) throwing in a healthy spattering of ground-level ordinary troopers and even a civilian or two so you can skip between perspectives and view the ridiculously big overpowered explosions from behind void shields 150 metres in the air or from a terrifying Normal Person's-Eye View - and Dan does both of these brilliantly. There are at least five or six separate plot threads going off within this book, and while only overlapping intermittently, they all wind up contributing somewhat to the overall resolution, and all get wrapped up largely satisfactorily. While for me this is nowhere near the re-read value of Gaunt's Ghosts, it was still a thumping good read; and it's always fun to see the Adeptus Mechanicus up close, they're so weird as a faction that I find them disturbing and fascinating and hilarious and tragic all at once, and Dan captures new angles of them in exciting and surprisingly relatable ways.

* The simplest way to explain them to non-40k initiates is to ask "have you seen Pacific Rim? well yeh, basically that, but moreso, and fighting entire armies instead of the odd kaiju or two."