So, I 'd like to compile a list of "must have" books covering the broad
domain of transdisciplinary integration, cybernetics and systems theory,
the sciences of complexity, scientific world views, philosophy of science,
etc. In other words, the domains covered by the Principia Cybernetica
Project (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/) and by the "Einstein meets Magritte"
conference, for those of you who have been there. I am thinking about
classics such as Ashby, von Bertalanffy, Kuhn, Wiener and Bateson, but also
about more recent overviews, reference works or handbooks, such as the
recent works of Klir, Prigogine, Dawkins, Rosen and Kauffmann.
I would like everybody to browse through their bibiliographic database and
make a selection of the works they find most important. You might even
score books, and give them a number of stars depending on how good you
think they are. If you are in an active mood, you might even add a comment
summarizing what the book is about and why it is important. I prefer to
receive references starting with the author's surname, so that they are
easy to sort, e.g.:
Dawkins R. (1976): The Selfish Gene, (Oxford University Press, New York).
If I get enough responses, I will use the same technique that I
successfully applied to compile a bibliography on the evolution of
complexity (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/evocobib.html): add all lists
together, and count those works mentioned by more than one person. The more
people mention a book (and the more stars it gets), the higher the overal
score it gets in the list of "classics".
With such a list, we will have a good basis to choose books for our
library. I will make the resulting compilation available on the Web for
everybody to use. This may also help us to update our 5 year old list of
recommended cybernetics and systems books:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/csbooks.html
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen, Systems Researcher fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
PESP, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6292525; Fax +32-2-6292489; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html