T
here's a book, the
History of 20th Century Philosophy of Science, that starts immediately with the following sentence:
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The aim of philosophy of science is to understand what scientists did and how they did it, where history of science shows that they performed basic research very well.
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This stopped me dead in my tracks. It's just so wrong, in several different ways, and it's only the first sentence. I was going to ask if anyone thought I should bother continuing, but I started skimming the rest of the book and have decided it won't be worth my effort, mostly because I'm already familiar with the ground it covers and I thought it was going to have a different focus.
But it's perhaps the first time that the first sentence of a book made me snap-to and think that perhaps I shouldn't read it. Maybe more books should have such clear warning signs. No slight intended to the author, it's just clearly a work that I should pass on.