It contains more information than Bermudez's book, but I prefer Bermudez's flow, organization and content selection. al.'s Cognitive Science: An Introduction to Mind and Brain. While not the best place to start, Thagard's book is a decent follow-up to Bermudez's text. In truth, the term refers to a set of competing theories, for example the computational theory and the representational theory. The book is only 270 pages long, and is also more idiosyncratic than Bermudez's for example, Thagard refers to the dominant paradigm in cognitive science as the 'computational-representational understanding of mind,' which as far as I can tell is used only by him and people drawing from his book. In contrast,В Paul Thagard's Mind: Introduction to Cognitive ScienceВ skips the context and jumps right into a systematic comparison (by explanatory merit) of the leading theories of mental representation: logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, and neural networks. Bermudez does a good job of making himself invisible, and the explanations here are some of the clearest available. Reason: Jose Luis Bermudez's Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of MindВ does an excellent job setting the historical and conceptual context for cognitive science, and draws fairly from all the fields involved in this heavily interdisciplinary science. Recommendation: Cognitive Science, by Jose Luis Bermudez Be sure to get the 6th edition, which has major improvements over the 5th edition. Melchert's history is also the only one to seriously cover the dominant mode of Anglophone philosophy done today: naturalism (what Melchert calls 'physical realism'). Melchert's textbook, The Great Conversation,В is accurate but also the easiest to read, and has the clearest explanations of the important positions and debates, though of course it has its weaknesses (it spends too many pages on ancient Greek mythology but barely mentions Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy and of the philosophy of language). Anthony Kenny's recent 4-volume history, collected into one book as A New History of Western Philosophy, is both exciting and accurate, but perhaps too long (1000 pages) and technical for a first read onВ the history of philosophy. More accurate but dry and dull is Frederick Copelston's 11-volume A History of Philosophy. Reason: The most popular history of western philosophy is Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, which is exciting but also polemical and inaccurate. Recommendation: The Great Conversation, 6th edition, by Norman Melchert I'll start the list with three of my own recommendations. Once, a popular author on Less Wrong recommended Bertrand Russell's A History of Western PhilosophyВ to me, but when I noted that it was more polemical and inaccurate than the other major histories of philosophy, he admitted he hadn't really done much other reading in the field, and only liked the book because it was exciting. Rules #2 and #3 are to protect against recommending a bad book that only seems impressive because it's the only book you've read on the subject. You must briefly name the other books you've read on the subject and explain why you think your chosen textbook is superior to them.You must have read at least two other textbooks on that same subject.Post the title of your favorite textbook on a given subject.There have been other pages of recommended reading on Less Wrong before (and elsewhere), but this post is unique. What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. Make progress by accumulation, not random walks.Д«ut textbooks vary widely in quality. Less Wrong has often recommended the 'read textbooks!' method. That's what they are designed to be, after all. I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful.

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