100 books like Classical Probability in the Enlightenment

This novel is the best account of the gambling psychology I know. It is a first-person narrative, ruthless in its depiction of the lies that addicts know they’re telling themselves. The story of a resentful compulsive gambler, the poor but superior tutor to a Russian family at “Roulettenburg,” it was itself the subject of a bet. Dostoevsky signed away his next decade’s worth of publishing profits unless he could deliver a new novel within a year. With six weeks to go he hadn’t written a word. He delivered the completed novel several hours before the deadline was going to pass. 

Argentinians in 1950s Paris argue about art and philosophy. They fall in and out of love to a jazz soundtrack. The novel itself is in love with the modern city and the secret patterns of chance. Prefacing it is a ‘table of instructions’ in which the author writes that "this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56... The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter."

There’s an exhilaration of structure, a deadpan formal playfulness that still thrills. It’s the book that taught me the most about reading. And, not entirely coincidentally, it’s the book that made me realise I was going to become a writer.

A young man loses all his money in a Paris casino and goes off to drown himself in the Seine. Before he can do so, he wanders into an antiquarian’s shop of treasures and is offered the skin of the title, a magical pelt that will grant its possessor any wish, but shrink each time, diminishing the possessor’s life force in the process. It’s a moral tale of wish fulfillment and identity, but most of all, it’s a thrilling glittering dark tale of ambition and excess. 

When I was researching Luck, I came across many books that claimed to teach the willing acolyte how to seize opportunity and how to maximise reward while minimising risk. This is the one that’s worth paying attention to. The Oracle is a collection of three hundred maxims for practical success, in condensed, often paradoxical form, written by a seventeenth-century Jesuit. Nietzsche said of it that "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety" and who’s going to argue with Nietzsche?

As the Western Roman Empire crumbled in the early 5th century, science and learning were extinguished for a thousand years…or, perhaps not. As Ehsan Masood shows in this highly enjoyable book to accompany a BBC series, Islamic scholars did much more than simply blow on the cinders of ancient Greek learning to keep them burning from the 8th to the 16th century. Names such as ibn-Sina, Jabir ibn-Hayyan, and Al-Khwarizmi may not be quite so well known to Western European ears as Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes, but Masood shows that they were actively involved in medicine, chemistry and mathematics during this time. So go with Masood on a journey through the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, and beyond to be persuaded that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were perhaps not quite so dark as we’ve been led to believe.

This book focuses on another group of influential women. They are six women of significant scientific accomplishment who have been almost entirely written out of history. Through painstaking research, Gelbart brings these women vividly to life. She reveals their extensive scientific work and significant accomplishments as well their influence on male scientists and intellectuals. She also notes the obstacles they faced and the sacrifices they made to do their work.

The reader walks with Gelbart through the streets of Paris as she gives her figures a rich personal and professional context in time and space. She illuminates the scientific context of the Enlightenment by bringing these women into our historical understanding of the period. Her empathic treatment exposes the difficulties faced by women who pursued science, many of which continue to plague twenty-first-century female scientists.

If you know anyone who still holds on to the belief that science can operate in a political vacuum, please thrust this book upon them! In 1673, a brave philosopher called Francois Poullain de la Barre publicly observed that he saw no reason why women could not be treated as the equals of men in all spheres of influence, including science. The Mind has no Sex, he declared! In this wonderfully readable book on the history of women in science, Londa Schiebinger shows us just how that belief played out. Track the jaw-dropping arrogance of science’s male gatekeepers as they systematically used every trick in their power to exclude women, weaponising their biology against them (Blame the Brain!), demeaning and downgrading their annoyingly evident talents. This book will make you angry – and so it should!

One of the things I love about this book is that it takes us back to 1831, when Darwin was just an obscure 22-year-old, following his passion for natural history by embarking on what would be a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. I get the impression he would be a fascinating, if exhausting, travelling companion since he is relentlessly curious about everything and everyone he sees.

My favorite chapter is on the Galápagos archipelago because Darwin is trying to do descriptive justice to the unearthly basaltic lava landscape, as well as unique flora and fauna. I find there’s an immediacy to his writing which gives me the sense of looking over his shoulder as he describes all the elements of unfamiliar ecosystems, trying to puzzle out what they can possibly mean. 

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. 

There are many short, accessible introductions to what current philosophers of science spend their time arguing about; this is one of the best. It wisely doesn’t cover everything, but instead uses Francis Bacon’s crucial break with the authority of Aristotle as a point of entry into current debates on half a dozen core issues such as inductive inference, progress, and realism.