My first favorite book is GEB, which has been covered already. My third favorite book is Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and Bohm's thoughts have also already been covered. However, to my knowledge my second favorite book, and author, has not yet received due credit. And this cannot stand!
Every student of science has heard of Popper and Kuhn, but who can rival their dogmatism? Leo has also already mentioned Feyerabend, who was famous for Against Method. But who's penmanship is missing from this book?
Imre Lakatos (eem-ray lack-a-tosh). Proofs and Refutations. Not only did Lakatos offer an alternative philosophy of science that rivals the propositions of Popper and Kuhn, but the second half of Against Method, which was meant to be titled For Method, was never written because its author died before he had his chance.
The concept of Proofs and Refutations is to replicate the entire history (more or less) of mathematics in one book, as a dialogue between a professor and his students as they attempt to define the term 'poyhedron' in a way that's conducive to Euler's formula V-E+F=2. The narrative poses a dramatic conflict between formal and informal mathematics and seeks to answer the following question: how does insight arise in the process of developing a proof? His proposition: starting from a naive position and integrating refuted lemmas builds insight out of scratch (more-or-less). This calls to mind Nietzsche's statement, "God is supposed to be eternal, according to the witness of the most pious: whoever has that much time, takes his time. As slowly and as stupidly as possible: in this way, one like that can still get very far".
The intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, and self-improvement-al implications are endless (ooohh very enticing I bet).
“Intellectual honesty does not consist in trying to entrench or establish one's position by proving (or 'probabilifying') it - intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one's position. Marxists and Freudians refuse to specify such conditions: this is the hallmark of their intellectual dishonesty.” -Imre Lakatos (from not this book, but still. also no offense to Marxists as I know nothing about Marxism).
P.S.
How come you never talk about fictional sorta books that cover philosophical and existential topics? Toooo much science stuff it seems to me. Fiction is the shit. Have you heard of Georges Bataille, or Clarice Lispector, or Fernando Pessoa? Scientists practically never lose their entire damn minds in the pursuit of seeing themselves become actualized (-.org) but it happens all the damn time in fiction.
Thanks.
Plain truths come in a home-spun dress,
-Lord Timothy Dexter
