Good books on the philosophy of science?

I've only read E.O. Wilson's Consilience. I think this is the thing I find most interesting in general about science: the scientific process and the ideas/philosophies behind it. Any recommendations?

Anything by Ian Hacking is fantastic. I really love his two books about the transition of questions about randomness and chance from being outside the scope of scientific inquiry to a formalized part of mathematics: The Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability. His book The Social Consruction of What? is a really thorough book about what we talk about when we talk about science being socially constructed; this one I found a bit harder than the two probability books. Also, T. Tymoczko's edited volume New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics was really eye-opening to me; some of the essays probably require a working knowledge of modern mathematics but I think many don't.

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the first one I'd recommend.

For philosophy of mathematics I'd recommend other texts (like my own!)

btw Euler I love yr tombstone

can't go wrong with bruno latour.

ian hacking is good too.

I was going to recommend steve fuller on kuhn but now it turns out fuller has gone and become some sort of pro-intelligent-design proponent so i'm now dubious about everything he's ever done. Speaking of which, of course its also important to read kuhn.

Lakatos might also be up your alley.

oh and andrew pickering too.

yeah, kuhn is usu. the starting point for philosophy and sociology of science per se. in my area there is physics and philosohpy by heisenberg, which i haven't read.

i changed from physics and philosophy joint hons. to straight physics fairly early on in my undergrad, but the reading list in the first year, in addition to a bunch of metaphysics, included:

Don Gillies, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century (Blackwells)
James Ladyman, Understanding Philosophy of Science (Routledge)

with your bio background you might also enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F, which is of course bullshitting rather than formal philosophy and factually dated but totally rad all the same.

Another possibility would be Coffa's The Semantic Turn, which is more a history of analytic philosophy but philosci is tightly wrapped in that history and (key) Coffa was a terrific writer.

Oh shit yeah, for philobio the obv choice is the rad Sex and Death.

Gregory Bateson
Soren Brier

Popper might be controversial, but still essential on this

If you really want to get hardcore you can go back to Charles Peirce. Still riveting and essential (imo). Reasoning and the Logic of Things is probably decent place to start.

Oh and that Heisenberg book mentioned above is really good.

caek that book looks fun

I enjoy reading some outdated stuff bcz it gives you a glimpse into a difft mindset & reminds me that things How They Are Now are imperfect & incomplete in many ways.

Bruno Latour "We Have Never Been Modern"

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer "Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life"

Euler, would you be comfortable providing us a link to your book(s)?

For philosophy of mathematics I'd recommend other texts (like my own!)

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If we're droppin' Kuhn and Lakatos then you can't miss out the old firebrand Feyerabend, and "Against Method".

Here are a few recommendations from the Cold War era—which is, perhaps, for unfortunate reasons, the most important era for comprehending the philosophy of science and mathematics:

Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science (John Rudolph)
Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Rebecca Lowen)
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (John Krige)
American Science in an Age of Anxiety (Jessica Wang)
Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Lynn Eden)

I took Professor Feyerabend's Ancient Philosophy course at Berkeley, he used to make science students flip out and become really furious.

Because people were recommending Latour upthread, I will unreservedly and enthusiastically recommend Gr4h4m H4rm4n's Prince of Networks, esp. if you're interested in contemporary "Continental" philosophy. H4rm4n is a realist philosopher who builds upon Latour, his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Heidegger, and Leibniz, among other thinkers. In this book, he spends the first half on his interpretation of Latour, and the second half discussing the relevance of Latour's work to H4rm4n's own object-or1ented ontology. Fantastic.

It's available for free in .pdf form at the publisher's website here: http://www.re-press.org/content/view/63/38/ Although, of course, you should purchase a copy of the high-quality paperback and support the author and publisher!

I should start a "S/D: contemporary Continental philosophy" thread.

S/D: Contemporary Continental Philosophy

That harman book looks great! Thanks

No problem! And it is great. He's also incredibly lucid and a wonderful writer. Check out his blog while you're at it. http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com

Since the argument by design came up upthread let me also recommend Elliott Sober for philosophy of biology and probability. Haven't read his books but the papers on his website are excellent.

I love Kuhn, &the thinking in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions is really intuitive, uncomplicated and satisfying, a good book indeed. The Frank Kogan thread on Kuhn on ilx is great Thomas S. Kuhn, all clean&focussed thinking, very steady and thorough, it's beautiful. Most secondary stuff I've read on Kuhn has been very confused&caught up on terminology&even big names e.g. Lakatos don't seem to understand him, but Mr Kogan makes an easy job of staying on point. Short of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions being rewritten w/out terms like "normal science" to throw ppl off, that's about as good as there is.

Another thing of beauty is David Stove's "Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists", perhaps the most incredible piece of shit I've ever read. Some excruciating point-missing and tying himself in knots, all with a heavy but unexamined moralistic tone, but it's genuinely a pretty great read as an exercise in pinpointing exactly where he gets it wrong and working out why he needs to say what he does. I think the confused ideas about rationality that he dregs up are pretty common, and perhaps explain why a lot of people can't get on board with Kuhn.

Wow, just learned a weird thing about Imre Lakatos. In WW2 Hungary he formed a resistance cell after Germany invaded. It was joined by a 19 year old Jewish antifascist, Eva Izsak. At some point Lakatos feared that she would be captured and would betray the resistance cell so he, along with his wife, persuaded her to commit suicide. His wife took Eva into the woods where she swallowed a cyanide capsule. It was at around the same time that Hungarian Jews were being rounded up and sent off to extermination camps.

Not sure what light that throws on Lakatos's philosophy of science - but wow.

I didn’t know that either.

I know a story of another academic from the East who made it out to a career in the USA who did considerably worse than that. I can’t say anything more, even with this this thin veneer of anonymity here. May we never end up in such a situation.