Keith Douglas' Web Page

About me Find out who I am and what I do.
My resumé A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious.
Reviews, theses, articles, presentations A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated.
Current research projects What I am currently working on, including some non-research material.
Interesting people People professionally "connected" to me in some way.
Interesting organizations Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.)
Intellectual/professional influences Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books.
Professional resources Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc.
What is the philosophy of computing? A brief introduction to my primary professional interest.
My intellectual heroes A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead.
My educational philosophy As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources.
I don't remember this book enough to comment here.

An outstanding book about the relevance of emotions to our powers of reasoning drawn carefully from basic science and case studies.

Fans and antifans of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology alike rightly regard this as a founding document in their field. Dated, but we should all read classics now and then, no?

The collection that contains the starting point for my MA thesis.

A book that launched a thousand missives and burnt the topless stacks of Illium, or something like that.

One of the first textbooks on computability/recursion theory since reprinted in a Dover edition. The typography is a bit strange and takes a bit of getting used to. Also includes (in this Dover edition) a reprint of the paper containing the proof of the MRDP theorem.

Classic papers and commentary, including a reprint of Turing's magnum opus.

This is the collected works of Emil Post.

The discussion of syntactic and semantic engines in this work is astonishing and very important.

Naysayers to this book's title: do better! Now, the explanation is incomplete: but how could it be? No explanation of anything factual ever is. Another book I keep rereading and learning more from. And yes, I am a behaviourist in disguise, exactly the way Dennett is. (That is, if you get too close to us, we all look like automata.)

A collection of Dennett's papers.

Dewey may be a bit squishy and invert the science-technology relation as far as I am concerned, but he does have interesting remarks to consider. Here's one of the works I've profited from reading.

This dictionary (in the edition I have) is obsolete in a lot of respects, but does hold some interest all the same.

A wonderful little book on the history of math. Does not shy away from technical details or the social environment of the figures discussed.

An otherwise relatively ordinary book on recursion theory and incompleteness, it also includes interesting exerpts from the historical figures involved in the development, philosophical discussion, and a timeline.

See my amazon.com review for this one.

5 volumes of the works of Gödel and translations of the same by a masterful team of scholars. Includes unpublished works and letters.

A volume of papers on the philosophy of technology, though at least one paper (by Nancy Cartwright) does not quite fit in this subject though is quite informative in its own right.

Contrary to what the reviewers on amazon.com will have you believe, yes, epistemological anarchism does entail subjectivism.

Feynman's take on many topics related to computation, including, amazingly, the thermodynamics of computation.

Feynman's magnum opus of basic physics. Includes also several mostly deserved snide remarks about philosophers.

A study of moral responsibility. This book desperately needs a (more developed, scientifically respectable) metaphysics.

Sociobiology and social science.

A collection of papers on the subject indicated by the title.

A textbook from my time at McGill.

An outline of the most successful pseudoscience of all time ...

A well known volume on ancient (preSocratic and Epicurean) atomism.

More from a respected scholar in ancient philosophy.

One of the founding texts in the field of belief dynamics. Seems to have been more popular amongst database theorists than epistemologists. I have produced two papers about it.

Includes a paper of Wilfried Sieg's that helped me with my MS thesis.

Good for SR by itself. Not so good on GR (due to math limitations) or on the connections between SR and electrodynamics.

See my amazon.com review.

An textbook of the most successful pseudoscience of all time ...

A monograph by one of the most important epistemologists of our time.

Another monograph by one of the most important epistemologists of our time.

My friend Kathy has permenantly loaned me her edition of this tome. I have glanced through it and made use of some chapters to learn but have not studied it in detail. Seems to be remarkably comprehensive though with a little less biochemical emphasis than I would like for some purposes.

One of the initial shots in the so-called "Science War".

Another of the initial shots in the so-called "Science War". This time it consists of papers from a conference which included speakers from a variety of fields.

A monograph by another of the most important epistemologists of our time.

More from Susan Haack: a reprinting of some of her papers. Includes an amusing constructed dialogue between Peirce and Rorty that has to be read to be fully appreciated.

One of Haack's books on the philosophy of logic. Excellent reference.

Another elementary physics book I learned from.

A short treatise on metaphysics that covers many important topics.

The title here also explains the subject matter.

The less that is said about this volume the better. Eminently skippable. I heard Haraway speak at McGill once (after my return to Montreal). She speaks in the same way she writes: provocatively and with little argumentation.

I studied some of this volume as part of a philosophy of perception/epistemology course taught by Ian Gold. I understand the volume started the contemporary debate on philosophy of colour.

This book is an unintended study in the non sequitur. Makes the apalling and completely unjustified claim that Newton's Laws of Motion are a rape manual.

An interesting little book on epistemology.

The book that kindled my interest in physics.

"Connectionism" has one of its roots here ...

... and here, though only ex post facto.

Textbook in computer architecture, which also includes some interesting historical digressions.

A collection of papers on one of the most important inventions in exact philosophy and foundations research ever. It is a shame that its creator didn't live to see this volume.

Sympathetic and scholarly, this biography of Alan Turing is worth reading.

The book that made me realize that philosophy of computing was my major interest in life.

Papers on philosophy of mind broadly construed. Includes the dialogue "Is God a Taoist?" that all traditional theists should read, as well as all those haunted by determinism.

A collection of papers by Douglas Hofstadter, including the rules for Nomic, one of two self-modifying games I am aware of.

Daniel Dennett calls Hofstadter and his research group's work in this volume phenomenology. That it basically is, except that Husserl didn't have access to a computer. If he had, maybe he would have developed competing models to these ... grounded and testable ones, not dogmatic and superficial ones ...

A good one volume reference. Contains also some amusing entries, such as "Deaths of Philosophers."

For the multimedia-ists and HCI people.

I'm not into Bayesian epistemology, but this is a good introductory textbook on the subject.

A standard collection of papers on this strange subject matter.

Max Jammer is a careful and knowledgable historian of science. This is one of his studies.

See my amazon.com review.

I jokingly call Kant's famous book the most glorious failure in the history of philosophy. Yes, synthesizing rationalism and empiricism is a good idea. Yes, criticizing the excesses of metaphysics is a good idea. Yes, examining how mathematics is possible is a good idea. Shame about how he did all of that, though.

I like the first and the third chapters of this little book. The second is loopy - it tries to psychoanalyze Schrödinger.

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