Saturday, January 14, 2017

Top modern philosophy books

Want to know what passes as a great modern philosophy book? Here are the top ones with some relation to science (and a couple of others):
Most-cited Anglophone philosophy books published since WWII (according to Google Scholar)

These are rounded to the nearest 100. I tried to find all post-WWII philosophy books with at least 5,000 citations. ...

1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (89,500)

2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) (65,000)

8. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) (15,700)

14. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (1983) (12,800)

16. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991) (11,100)

20. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge:  An Evolutionary Approach (1972) (10,100)

21. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) (9,900)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) (9,500)
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) (8,400)
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984) (8,200)
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996) (7,400)
Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (1975) (7,300)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) (7,000)
Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach (2001) (6,900)
Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus & T. Athanasiou, Mind over Machine (2000) (6.800)
John Searle, Intentionality (1983) (6,500)
Popper occasionally said sensible things, but those are disavowed by modern philosphers.

Where are the philosophers who have contributed to modern scientific understanding? These books have hurt the cause of science more than they are helped.

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