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.
More computational neuroscience.

One of the linguistics textbooks I use.

An absolutely stunning book on recursion theory, including much material that is substantially too advanced for me to comment usefully on. It does include a philosophically very interesting discussion of the Church-Turing thesis, too.

This is a series of careful introductions to various aspects of cognitive science. I have only dealt with the volume on thinking to any great extent, but it impressed me enough to want the other volumes. See my wishlist for those!

History of multimedia, including some that predated the computer.

Another early shot in the "science wars" even though it is only partly about such matters.

Penfield's book is unfortunately embarassing, as his espousal of mind-body dualism is poorly argued - and he should have known better anyway!

Quantum mechanics, Gödel's theorem, computability, AI? What's not to like? Well, the outrageous conclusions Penrose (incorrectly) draws from them. But there's still a lot of interesting stuff in these.

Just an algebra textbook.

Another book on the "metaphysics" implied by our speech.

Pinker's claim to fame, a book on his take on Chomskyian linguistics.

More by Pinker, this time on evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. No wonder my former teacher Bunge finds this book so horrible. I don't, though I think the two aspects of the project should be distinguished and defended seperately.

A standard edition of Plato in English.

Amazon.com has up my review.

Is the direction of time a relational property? Price thinks so. Read this and learn why.

Two more histories of atomism.

One of the most famous works of philosophy of the 20th century.

I've forgotten most of this one, alas.

Another work on the foundations of probability.

Think that Heidegger and Nazism were just incidentally related? Read this and then get back to me.

Another book on the merits and demerits of sociobiology.

Continues Davidson's event semantics program, this time in other languages, etc.

More on sociobiology.

I've forgotten most of this one, alas.

Sahotra Sarkar was a visitor for a semester while I was at McGill.

I looked through this for references to Turing, as Scholz had ordered offprints of Turing's famous paper some years before. No such luck.

Communication theory, sensu social science.

Searle's famous book.

Psychology textbook; philosophically aware if unsophisticated in parts.

Important collection edited by my MS supervisor. Includes a paper by Clark Glymour explaining more or less what I take the role of philosophers vis-a-vis scientists and technologists to be these days.

See my MS thesis.

A review of mereology literature up to 1987 or so. Does not appreciate fully why Bunge's mereology includes a null individual, but otherwise a masterful reference.

More decision theory and epistemology, this time from another philosopher.

Don't bother unless you like pomos.

More physics-meets-metaphysics-through cosmology.

A funny, profound work. Smullyan proves the following theorem: if you think your beliefs are consistent, they aren't.

More "science war" stuff.

Modern work on ancient philosophy at its finest.

Title makes subject matter obvious. Needs accompaning lectures.

Another work I have alas forgotten.

Stenger and I have been e-colleagues for quite some time now. I heard him speak in Pittsburgh a few years ago.

I learned single variable calculus from an earlier edition of this large book.

More ancient philosophy.

More metaphysics.

We had this around in the CAAE and I was assigned part of it in a directed reading I did at CMU. The part I read was interesting enough.

If you don't know that von Neumann himself gave Turing credit for the "von Neumann architecture", take a look in here.

Not as acute as Frederick Crews, but still a good critique of psychoanalysis.

In two words: crazy and falsified. Does include an interesting discussion of the relevance of the Bekenstein bound to computability, though.

I don't think much of some of his work, but philosophy of science today includes the importance of van Fraassen, so paying attention to what he says is important.

A collection of classic papers in logic with careful commentary.

Another book on the foundations of probability.

How a mathematician sees philosophy. Includes a remark that set theory is not basic to mathematics, but rather that the theory of identity is.

Wang presents many of the intellectual aspects of Gödel's work in a patient and thorough way. However, readers be warned: this is not a bibliography in the usual sense.

Another famous work in 20th century metaphysics.

Title makes the subject obvious.

XML is a very handy computing standard to know something about. I know more than I otherwise would due to this book.

A thermodynamics and statistical mechanics textbook.

Like Dawkins' The Selfish Gene this book is more talked about than read.

I do not agree completely with his reductionism, but I do agree with Wilson's view of the unity of knowledge in broad outlines. A useful counter balance to some of what Bunge says in other ways.

I am one of those people who take Wittgenstein exactly at his word and do not try to "read too much into him". Here are three of his posthumously published books.

A little-appreciated classic in the philosophy and foundations of science.

Later edition of a general chemistry textbook I studied from.