50 books like How Should Research be Organised?

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. 

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.

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.

Nagel’s book is the most understandable explanation I’ve found about one of the most cosmically seminal math proofs: Godel’s incompleteness theorem.

It takes the idea of recursion and self-reference to the ultimate conclusion about truth, understanding, and boundaries of existence. This may sound hootie-tootie, but think of the sequence of abstraction in math: arithmetic, algebra, calculus, etc.

Once you add in recursion (self-reference), you’ve got the most important concepts underlying true understanding and productivity in software – something never discussed in computer science, and certainly not in practical programming.

Think about the so-called Von Neumann computer architecture, which underlies all modern computers – instructions are data, stored in the same place as ordinary data, and some instructions write data that are instructions. This is recursion taken to the next level. 

Raymond Smullyan is a riddler, a puzzler, well-known for various Knights and Knaves puzzles, a type of logic game where some characters can only answer questions truthfully, and others only falsely. However, I recommend this book as here he offers not only logical tricks but many insights too. One section offers the World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem which is a magnificent achievement but frankly, reminds me why I like long explanations sometimes.

Basically, this is an examination of boolean logic, which is (rather boringly) a branch of algebra in which all operations are either true or false, and relationships are expressed with logical operators such as and, or, or not. So it’s serious stuff, but also pretty funny along the way.

The discovery of penicillin is one of humanity’s greatest stories of serendipity and Eric Lax’s retelling is excellent.

Though Alexander Fleming has received the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, in truth, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley were the ones who discovered and proved the penicillium mold’s true medical effectiveness as an antibiotic.

How this trio from Oxford made their breakthrough at the height of WWII and were robbed of the credit is a fabulous tale as spellbinding as any Hollywood movie.

Surely the greatest work of philosophy of the 20th Century. It delves into a wide range of philosophical issues, including the relationship between language and the world. OK, it’s tough to understand without also reading some accompanying secondary literature – but it is endlessly beguiling. It’s one of the few works of philosophy that repays being re-read. I took a Wittgenstein paper at university - and have called myself a Wittgensteinian ever since.

Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitschrift is one of Žižek’s favorite philosophical works of all time. Schelling therein strives to develop an account of evil as a positive ontological reality unto itself, rather than a negative rendition of it as a simple privation of goodness. In so doing, he is led to elaborate a metaphysics in which determinism, à la a Spinoza-inspired ontological monism, and freedom, à la the self-legislating subject of German idealism, are rendered compatible. As part of this vision, Schelling distinguishes between “ground” and “existence”—with free subjectivity depicted as the resurgence, within the pacified, stable reality of existence, of the unruliness of shadowy, primordial ground. Žižek’s repeated recourses to quantum physics for ontological insights are heavily reliant on this Schelling in particular.

In Žižek’s view, philosophy as we know it today does not well and truly begin until the late-eighteenth century, with Kant’s critical-transcendental “Copernican revolution.” The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurates this revolution. It insists on the ineliminable centrality of the structures and dynamics of minded subjectivity for the constitution of what we experience as objective reality. Moreover, on Žižek’s psychoanalytic rereading of Kant’s epoch-making 1781/1787 masterpiece, Kant anticipates, among many other things, Lacan’s idea of an internally divided subject as the ultimate unconscious condition of possibility for how we humans register and understand ourselves and our world. Moreover, the Kant of the first Critique is crucial for Žižek as the inspiration for the entire tradition of post-Kantian German idealism so central to Žižek’s own philosophical program.