If you only read one thing I ever post, read this relatively quick biography of Paul Feyerabend, philosopher of science. His most famous work, Against Method (read the final chapter here), argues for 'epistemological anarchism.' This is the notion that no one set of rules can describe the process by which humans acquire knowledge, and that we must always try to see through the lenses of as many ideologies as possible. Anyway, Feyerabend's scholarly life and times conform pretty well to my conception of 60s/70s New Left academic hero: there's liberal piety, personal tumult, rejection by the academic community, searing friendship, trips to Europe, and romance. Skip the sections about his childhood and jump straight into the professional stuff.

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/stanford/entries/feyerabend/#Crit
posted by neel master at 10:27 PM

Subject: Philosophy of Science
It's an e-text of an out-of-print book by DC Stove, an Australian philosopher who died in 1984. He is hailed by conservatives as an overlooked/excluded genius:
http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/stove1.htm
http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/aahpsss/news48/a48_stov.htm

Anyway, here is a site that contains full texts of two of his works. From the preface to Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists:

This book is about a recent tendency in the philosophy of science: that tendency of which the leading representatives are Professor Sir Karl Popper, the late Professor Imre Lakatos, and Professors T.S.Kuhn and P.K. Feyerabend.

These authors' philosophy of science is in substance irrationalist. They doubt, or deny outright, that there can be any reason to believe any scientific theory; and a fortiori they doubt or deny, for example, that there has been any accumulation of knowledge in recent centuries.

He goes on, although I haven't gotten there yet, to conclude that these folks all rely on Hume, and they're all wrong. Read the whole thing:

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4118/dcs/
posted by neel master at 10:22 PM

Erving Goffman is an influential social scientist indeed. He wrote one of my favorite books, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I'll have to spend a little time coming up with an unimpeachable summary of Goffman, but for now you can look at a mock Erving Goffman trading card courtesy of theory.org.uk:

http://www.theory.org.uk/cards/card06.htm

I clearly don't know how to make that a link yet. Do I put tags in this thing or what? Do I even remember how to write tags? no.

So much for this blog.
posted by neel master at 1:30 AM