Susan Haack

It took everything I had to get all the way through this one, and I'm pretty sure it all comes down to style. My guess is you'll both understand and/or enjoy Defending Science depending on your degree of familiarity with and enjoyment of the style and conventions of analytic philosophy (and probably the terms used in formal logic). My beef was more with the sorts of self-congratulatory barbs of "wit" this style often entails—maybe what's meant as an attempt to be funny, but which winds up just being needlessly insulting. I've no idea, in other words, how to rate this one—only that I wouldn't hand it to a layperson interested in examining what science is or why it's valuable, etc.

Incidentally, I started this book after having enjoyed a shorter journal article by Haack on the same subject.… (meer)