Raymond Lam > Recent Status Updates

Dummett's Dewey Lectures on logical analysis of statements about the past.

Lewontin's groundbreaking working on population genetics presentation of evolution. Much different than Dawkins gene replication and Gould puntuated equilibrium.

Good collection of poems from Tang dynasty poet Du Fu with exposition and commentary

Carroll's theory of time taking into account 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and multiverse

Surprisingly a page turner. Not nuts and bolts JEPD documentary analysis. Lots of historical anecdotes about the origins of the Torah, prophets, and the writings about how ancient books are written and passed on. Kaiser is an interesting lecturer and apparently a good writer

Nagel's panpsycheist monism solution to mind/body problem. Ingenious.

Useful contrast of the two leading evolutionary theorists with very different views

Salmon's work connecting semantics to metaphysics. Can essentialism be derived from a direct theory of reference? Nicely written smooth reading

Gould's classic criticism of measuring intelligence by cranial capacity and IQ test from the stand point of evolution biology.

Before Hawking and Dawkins, Gould introduces the world to delightful scientific writing with wonderful storytelling. In this early work, Gouid uses the Panda's thumb to illustrate that evolution is an imperfect process that by which adaptation is based on imperfect modification of existing structure for local survival advantages

Methodically and meticulously written analytic moral philosophy.

Linde goes in the great details of various phase transitions, both cold and hot, and how changes in coupling constant, field value, temperature value affects the Lagrangian

The definitive work on Jurisprudence and the theory of law by Finnis that I should have read since one of my thesis papers was on legal philosophy. But I did it on Dworkin under whom I learnt the subject at Oxford. Now just covering what i missed

Finnis was Gorsuch and Robert George's supervisor

The content is a bit like his class "The Early Universe" at MIT. He writes likes he talks: lucid, methodical and direct. Very MIT. There is nothing better to learn inflation model from the originator

Glad to see Dawkins back to his element writing about biology instead of pop philosophy in the last 10 years.

Kip Thorne offers an historical journey and the astrophysics of black hole from its initial denial by Einstein and named as Schwarzschild singularity. Nice format. He left technical details and equations in a box along the way if you want to work it out

New Oxford Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Religion, Brian Leftow, on the metaphysics of timeless God. He succeeded my supervisor Richard Swinburne who holds the opposite view of God in time.

Searle's lectures, neurobiologie et liberté, that I attended at the Sorbonne but published in an English translation. He was the only American academic i saw who delivered his lectures in French. Even Chomsky and Davidson lectured in English

The most influential work on Davidson's scheme and content in perception since the 90s. I did not get to it until now.

Hawking/Dawkins style clarity science writing. A founder of Loop Quantum Gravity explains his approach

It is hard to believe it has been over 100 years since Einstein introduced general relatvity. Ironically most physics students are not required to read his original work. Everyone usees the giant bible "Gravitation" by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler from MIT to Caltech

The problem of evil is always the most interesting issue of the philosophy of religion because of the variation offered to how the issue can be creatively formulated into a new puzzle to solve. Here Adams formulated whether the existence of "horrendous evil" is logically compatible with the existence of an OOP God.

An original classic that Weinberg explains the Big Bang from red shift and cosmic background radiation. I went to his lectures at Caltech but never got around to read the book

Vilenkin's original work on the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem and inflationary multiverse model

Finally catching on the biggest recent debate in physics between Hawking and Suskind: what happened when something falls into a black hole ? The answer is not just about black hole. It affects basic laws of conservation and thermodynamics

He did not even know how to swim when he signed the contract for BUDS.

Gould's definitive technical statement of punctuated equilibrium. Being not a life science background, I have to look up words constantly: phenotype, biospecies, morphospecies, phylogeny, neontological, anagenetic. Now I know how lay people feel when they read physics books

I didn't realise it is a pictorial book (that weighs a ton), but nice to have photos when you are reading paleontology

No one asked the question of whether DNA can still be found in a mummy until Paabo when he was a grad student in the 80s, which made him the first person to bring molecular biology into paleontology