A Reader's reviews
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-11-02 01:40:44 for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
(Language: English)
 
Very rarely does a book so ill-written become so influential. Kuhn overstated his case and then spent the rest of his life trying to mitigate the strong claims in his book. The problem is that the book is written so loosely and ahistorically, that you’re not going to get a lot of real meat out of it. Just one small example, Kuhn himself admits that the usage of the word “paradigm†in the main text was sufficiently vague enough to allow 22-distinct interpretations. Yikes. Like the bible, the text is open to so many different readings that one can pull many incommensurate interpretations from it that are all reasonably textually evidenced. Whoops: talk about irony! At bottom, a strong interpretation of the text just doesn’t historically pan out while a weak interpretation is trite and rather obvious. One needs to read this to understand the history and philosophy of science in the 20th century—but be forewarned: if you approach this book with any scholastic rigor, its shortcomings will be sharp and painful.
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Yes (3) 
No (1)
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-19 03:08:32 for Scary Stories Boxed Set.
(Language: English)
Holy Hell: I cannot believe that they let children read these books. But thank ye gods that they do, because one will be hard pressed to find a more disturbing collection of work made for young people. Alvin Schwartz does a fine job collecting American horror folk-lore and retelling it in simple, short and sparse stories. For what they are, they are quite good. I remember reading them in fourth grade--the jump from Where's Waldo to this craziness was almost too much to take, as I recall. There is a fair amount of gore and disturbia here. It's good for children to have, I think; it assists in one's maturation, aesthetically preparing one for a world that is far less happy than Dr. Suess (though just as strange). But what really makes the book is the artwork by Stephen Gammell. One could pick up this book for no other reason apart from his strane charcoal drawings. Absolutely amazing and still, to this day, nightmarish. Even more so as I recall my 7-year-old self leafing through the book(s). This book started me along a long strange path of strangeness. Kudos, Mr. Schwarts, you're part of the chemistry that ruined my childhood.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-12 08:40:21 for The Fabric of the Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics.
(Language: English)
Many people are under the impression that Newton discovered science when it fell onto his head. This book offers a good correction ot this view. Finally: a popular history that understands the evolution of science and doesn't reduce early developers to caricatures and straw men.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-11 05:14:11 for 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four.
(Language: English)
1984 is viewed by many in our generation as something as a relic and a cliché. It is a relic because of its age and its lessons about the perils of bureaucratic totalitarianism seem rather obvious. It is a cliché because we have read this sort of dystopian novel so many times before, and its themes (like in that awful recent V for Vendetta movie) are recycled year after year. But a historical perspective is in order. This novel, along with We, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, is the beginning of this theme; and such a theme’s perennial re-usage is, I think, is mandatory for keeping our little project of humanity humming along. As originators of a genre, they are important works. For it seems that each generation has a habit of forgetting some (or many) of the lessons hard learned by the prior. From the blatant oppression in states like North Korea, to the more subtle institutional pressures we experience in our own country, the world is rife with images that could be directly lifted from 1984 and the other dystopic novels. While not paragons of high art, they remain frightfully relevant; so perhaps we ought to keep on reading.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-10 11:30:30 for House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition.
(Language: English)
This is trash literature. The author masks a genuine story with parlor tricks in his prose, using color, font, and spacing to convey meaning. So the text may fall to or wind around to simulate like events in the story. The word "alone" might appear by itself on the page to designate loneliness, etc etc. And, of course, half the story is told in the footnotes. In the end, none of it is very frightening or convincing--as a horror novel or as an academic satire. It is a sort of easy-to-read experimentalist literature; pretentious and strange enough to make itself appear intellectual, but the various concepts presented throughout are in-of-themselves not challenging enough to appear in a intro philosophy class. And the prose itself is not very lively; it is like an amalgamation of the worst of ee cummings and Stephen King. Like many so "experimental" novels, the book camouflages its mediocrity behind a thick layer of syntactic gymnastics. If you want truly experimental magnificence, you're better of with, say, John Gardner's Grendel or the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Avoid.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-10 11:10:16 for Moral Realism: A Defence.
(Language: English)
This book may frustrate moral realists and non-realists alike. While it is a good survey of the various views, it doesn't go into very much detail. The discussions often lack the nuance and rigor that one is looking for in a philosophical work. It just seems a bit rushed. But there are two key problems. (1) His own view, a sort of reliablism, is not very pursuasively argued at the end of the book. It seems rather underdeveloped and not-quite-ready-for-prime-time. A defense of reliablism is going to be complex and interesting enough to be the theme of its own book, not the last few chapters of this one. (2) In a book that is supposed to be a defense of non-moral facts, by the time one finishes the read, one still has no idea what, ontologically speaking, a moral fact is supposed to be. To what do moral facts refer. Shafer-Landau never talks deeply about bit, instead focusing on what moral facts are not, and how moral facts might superveine on natural ones. Similar to the issue of (1), it seems to me that the relation of moral and natural facts could be its own text--as wading through this topic is key to making sense of moral fact. You can avoid this book. Shafer-Landau is better read in journal pieces, and not book-length works.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-10-10 10:45:52 for Language, Truth and Logic.
(Language: English)
Positivism of most flavors is as dead as a philosophical paradigm can get; however, nearly all the current debates in the philosophy of science and language are largely reactions to the various figures of the positivist movement. So while much of this text is dated, it is an important read for the sake of historical perspective. Further, the general spirit of the positivist methodology(ies) still drive many areas of inquiry--particularly in the hard sciences. In fact, apart from Ayer's brand of phenomenology and his semantic reductionism, his views are still accepted by many within the scientific community. While at times a bit cocky, it is a clearly written, quick-read. It's a must-read for anyone interested in either the history of scientific methodology or the philosophy of science.
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