A book that should be read

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Here is another book I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the computational/informational turn in philosophy and especially in philosophy of science:

Paul Humphreys, Extending Ourselves - Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method (Oxford: OUP, 2004; 2007 paperback).

That it took me so long to read it merely shows how high the pile of my "legenda" is, it is not an indication of the quality of the text.

Humphreys provides one of the best assessments known to me of the new form of computational empiricism that we might see develop in the future.

The book is short, but full of information and packed with good ideas and suggestions. It has a very urbane, no-frills way of "being real" about several philosophical issues too often treated as scholastic untouchable dogmas and emptied of real life. His discussion of the realism debate is refreshing, for example, and the chapter on simulations is most interesting.

In a way, it could almost be read as a survey of philosophy of science from a computer-based perspective. It does have a bias for (some times esoteric) examples taken from physics and statistics, but even if these escape the average reader (and some definitely escaped your blogger), the gist of the philosophical ideas is never lost.

Here is a little taste of the contents of book:
Note 15, p. 56 "[...] If the philosophy of computational science is a footnote to Plato, it's an exceedingly long one." Exactly.

Don't miss it.

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