Reading

Knowledge and inquiry

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957)
Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994)
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (1972)
Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (1995)
Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides (1998)
Bryan Magee, Popper (1973)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Imre Lakatos, “Falsification” (1970)
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)
Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (1977)
Larry Laudan, “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem” (1983)
Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906)
Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951)
John Worrall, “The Problem of Induction” (1989)
Sandra Harding (ed.), Can Theories Be Refuted? (1976)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
Carl Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (1966)
A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
Rudolf Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950)
David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976)
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)
Heather Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (2009)
Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (1990)
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958)
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1979)
Daniel Hausman, The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (1992)
Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (1998)

Models and explanation

Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (1980)
Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983)
Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (1999)
Anjan Chakravartty, A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism (2007)
Hasok Chang, Is Water H₂O? (2012)
Henk de Regt, Understanding Scientific Understanding (2017)
Michael Weisberg, Simulation and Similarity (2013)
Margaret Morrison and Mary Morgan (eds.), Models as Mediators (1999)
Paul Humphreys, Extending Ourselves (2004)
Eric Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation (2010)
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (1997)
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” (2003)
David Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022)
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986)
Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (2001)

Confirmation, probability, and inference

Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning (1989)
John Earman, Bayes or Bust? (1992)
Richard Jeffrey, Subjective Probability: The Real Thing (2004)
Branden Fitelson, “The Plurality of Bayesian Measures of Confirmation” (1999)
Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable (2024)
Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000)
Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines, Causation, Prediction, and Search (1993)
James Woodward, Making Things Happen (2003)
Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (1991)
Deborah Mayo, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing (2018)
Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (1975)
Lorenz Krüger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution (1987)
Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988)

Philosophy of technology and engineering

Walter Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It (1990)
Edwin Layton, Technology as Knowledge (1974)
Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method (2003)
W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology (2009)
Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human (1985)
George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (1988)

Analytic epistemology

A.J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (1956)
Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (1963)
Alvin Goldman, “What Is Justified Belief?” (1979)
Ernest Sosa, “The Raft and the Pyramid” (1980)
Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (2000)
Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969)

Revolution and enlightenment

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627)
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973)
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957)
E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1924)
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966–69)
Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010)
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000)
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (2001)
Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment (2023)
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (2002)

Philosophy of biology

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995)
Richard Byrne, “Imitation as Behaviour Parsing” (2003)
Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979)
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (1987)
Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio, Biological Autonomy (2015)
Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio, An Evolutionary Story of Agency (2025)
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009)
Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order (1993)
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (1995)
Denis Walsh, Organisms, Agency, and Evolution (2015)
Leonardo Bich, Biological Organization (2024)
Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short Introduction (2019)
Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology (2000)

Philosophy of mind

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974)
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996)
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991)
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, The Mind’s I (1981)
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (2007)
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984)
Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950)
John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980)
Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (1975)
Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy (1986)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)
Karl Popper and John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (1977)
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (2018)
Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982)
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)
Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind (2008)
Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty (2015)
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (2007)
Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind (2003)
Tom Griffiths, Bayesian Models of Cognition (2024)
Tom Griffiths, The Laws of Thought (2026)
Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (1996)
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (1994)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul (2012)
Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action (1998)
Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents (1995)
Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness (2016)
Fred Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, “The Bounds of Cognition” (2001)
Susan Schneider, Artificial You (2019)
Romain Brette, The Brain, in Theory (2023)
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot (2024)
John Duncan, The Animal and the Thinker (2023)
Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Vicente Raja, Ecological Psychology (2024)

Philosophy of language

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989)
Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference” (1892)
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962)
Paul Grice, “Meaning” (1957) and “Logic and Conversation” (1975)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (1960)
Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1980)
Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975)
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957)
Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956)
Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit (1994)
Steven Piantadosi and Felix Hill, “Meaning without Reference in Large Language Models” (2022)
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (1980)

History of psychology

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917)
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)
Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (1927)
Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924)
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Freud: In His Time and Ours (2016)
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970)
Carl Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Roger Smith, Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology (2013)
Graham Richards, Putting Psychology in Its Place (2010)
Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex (1985)
John O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism (1985)
Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science (1985)
Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason (2005)
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (1929)
John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (1913)
B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953)
George Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (1956)
Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” (1959)
Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (1967)
Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (1990)
Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind (1997)
Roger Smith, The Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997)

History of neuroscience

Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain (2020)
Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience (1994)
Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain (2000)
Olaf Sporns, Discovering the Human Connectome (2012)
Olaf Sporns, Networks of the Brain (2011)
Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh (2004)
Robert Martensen, The Brain Takes Shape (2004)
Edwin Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function (1996)
Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (1987)
Max Bennett, A History of the Mind (2007)
Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003)
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator (1897)
Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906)
Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (1987)
Katja Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents (2015)
Roger Smith, Inhibition (1992)
Donald Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (1949)
Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain (2014)
David Eagleman, The Brain (2015)
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020)

History of AI

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Language and Learning (1980)
Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (1980)
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986)
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010)
Terrence Sejnowski, The Deep Learning Revolution (2018)
Luc Steels, History of Ideas in the Science of AI (2025)
Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine (2006)
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997)
Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines (2016)
Sarah Ciston, Inventing ELIZA (2026)
Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity” (1993)

Scientific biographies

Francis Everitt, James Clerk Maxwell: Physicist and Natural Philosopher (1975)
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)
Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980)
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (2012)
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin (1995–2002)
J.L. Heilbron, Galileo (2010)
Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch (2015)
Max Caspar, Kepler (1959)
Jack Repcheck, Copernicus’ Secret (2007)