Maybe I'll Actually Finish Reading This One

Axioms is an online book (a draft of a book, rather) by Robert G. Brown about human knowledge and the human condition. Brown is a physicist, not a philosopher, and he writes here for the lay-audience, so his manner of discussing philosophical concepts may not be as sophisticated as one might hope: e.g., he marks a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge without using the terms a priori or a posteriori, and moreover does not write about them as one well-acquainted with the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, so far I am finding the content very relevant to my life and current thoughts, and I thought I should mention it here. He writes humorously and engagingly, making it easier to stay interested than so many other dry texts I've encountered.

Maybe, then, I'll actually get through more of this book instead of just recommending it and then losing interest, as I did with Motion Mountain in an earlier post.

Motion Mountain

Motion Mountain - The Free Physics Textbook (by Christopher Schiller) is positively amazing. It is a freely available online physics textbook aimed at attracting a wide variety of personality and thinking types (image/verbally oriented; male/female; composer/competitor; experimentally/theoretically inclined; scientific/humanity minded). I am not very far into it yet, but it has succeeded very well with me. I am really enjoying that it approaches physics from a very philosophically-minded standpoint--for example, Schiller describes time as that which allows contradictions to inhere within the same entity--provided that said contradictions occur at different times, of course. He talks about the notions of measurement, observation, and distinguishing objects from their environment (and how this relates to permanence versus variability).

Furthermore, it contains challenges at the end of each chapter to get you thinking more in-depth about the subject, and many of them are very conceptual rather than mathematical. Not that it's a bad thing at all to develop mathematical facility, but the mathematical detail happens to be (unfortunately) the area of physics I enjoy least. Throughout the chapters, Schiller asks us to ponder such questions as, do events exist? Do clocks even exist, really? What are the necessary conditions for velocity to be a part of the world? He also includes pleasant little historical details and social contexts. And he quotes from Wittgenstein's Tractatus often at the beginnings of sections, which is kinda fun =P.

I think he's done an admirable job making the book appealing to those from the humanities (such as myself--although I do have a bit of a computer science background in my distant past, and I'm very fond of logic). I can tell that I am going to enjoy the rest of this book immensely. It is astounding to me that someone took the effort to put this incredible resource together for free. Thank you so much, Christopher Schiller: I deeply appreciate your work.