Where do i get started with metaphysics and epistemology?

i'm starting my phd in physics this week and i don't want to end up like the guys on the right in pic-related.
does anybody have a guide for either epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science or really just any field that a scientist should be aware of if they want to see the forest instead of a tree?

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just read rand

start with Peirce

Plato, Descartes, Kant and related authors

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Read Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend is the core philosophy of science anno 2019.

>a scientist should be aware of if they want to see the forest instead of a tree?

This would be my cheat sheet for a physicist:
E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo
William James, Pragmatism
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind and The New Scientific Spirit
Wilfred Sellars, various things
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty, and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (and anything else you're interested in, aside from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, unless you have a specific interest in reading that)
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Essential Tension
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method and various other books, For and Against Method (his debate with Lakatos)
John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (this is a good, short touchstone for postpositivist philosophy of science)
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability

t. PhD student in His/Phil of Sci

Also some of these are optional honestly, like drop the Wittgenstein unless that sort of thing comes fairly easily for you. Most of the rest is either short, easy, or at least you can tear through it and get some sense of how contingent metaphysical epistemes/paradigms are in science.

Essential Tension is really worth skimming for a practicing scientist. Most people only read Structure but seeing how he applies his thinking is cool.

Plato's Theaetetus is really all you need.
Descartes, Hume, Kant, and everybody else ended up looping right where this work did.
Philosophy of science, as thought out by Popper, and then led in the direction that Kuhn and Feyerabend took it is mostly an extension of the Kantian lack of trust in both empricism and rationalism, which in turn link us back to Descartes' sixth meditation, where he remarks that, even if our perceptions and our line of reasoning be right, it is possible for our judgment to be flawed.
If you wish to read Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or Peirce's Principles of Philosophy, then by all means go ahead and read them, but I see no major advantage to reading any of those works over something either lighter like one of Plato's dialogues, or something that would actually be strictly relevant to philosophy of physics.

After all, it is easier to be overwhelmed by the amazing scope of philosophy and the works of so many philosophers all spread across time than it is to merely look for something which will bring one to doubt, which ought to be the primary objective of philosophy, rather than to serve as a ruler for the sciences. Spending one's life reading works about the philosophy of science might sound interesting, but it is possible for one to become disinterested in them once one notices the same themes popping up over and over, like whether or nor we can trust scales, methods, languages, or what constitutes as sufficient evidence (if there even is such thing).
People who love philosophy will of course give you extremely long reading list which will probably steal lots of time away from you restating much of the same stuff, except with slightly different terminology and referencing slightly different stuff in their cultural/historical context, yet they never quite set down the precise, perfect guidelines for how one ought to find the truth.

Where is the problem with what Richard Dawkins said

BASED CRINGE FEDORA REDPILL

It seems more like a praise of philosophy.

Well decartes said the brain is divided by the spirit mind located on the pineal gland and the physical mind and that animal spirits run through the nerves.
It could be nonsense or some sort of clue for neuroscientists for example maybe.

That was itself, from a philosophical standpoint, a fallacious belief though, because putting the soul in that part of the brain was at the time a God of the gaps. Philosophy is also a (although perhaps not as much as natural science) rigorous tradition.

it's literal dogmatism. let's be open minded to ideas except the ones i don't like.

Dawkins
>I mean it as a compliment...
Liberal arts majors
>WHAT THE FUCK DID HE SAY? DOES HE KNOW THAT EINSTEIN READ PHILOSOPHY???????

aristotle too :) :)

Lakatos LOL!!!! Yeah NIGGA, science is just a fcukin CIRCLE . foh

The only one of Aristotle's works that is important is the one that everyone already intrinsically knows about, which is his Organon.

>t. PhD student in His/Phil of Sci
how is studying philosophy? what about jobs? should i regret going for engineering instead of philosophy?

>don't think too much guys

Nothing, it was put there as bait

No.

Honestly start with the classics. Start with more ethos laden works like the Death of Socrates cycle in Plato’s Dialogues and then move on to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Hume’s short Essay Concern Human Understanding, Locke’s Essay, Leibniz’s shorter treatise where he first mentions stuff about monads, and, of course, Kant’s Prologomena. If you want more contemporary stuff relevant to your field/post-Popper and Khunian takes on epistemology as concerns science I’d recommend Quine’s Two Dogmas essay followed up by Kripke’s third lecture in Naming and Necessity. That’ll give you some firepower to first nuance the intimate relationship between metaphysics and systematic empirical thought and secondly to provide a framework for something like substantive science, at least as it plays out in the analytic tradition which always has a STEMlord fetish and subsequent subservience. Good luck user. A lot of this material is exciting stuff.

This is great, exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks a lot user, really appreciate it. I think I'll start of with these.

added Theaetetus to my reading list, much appreciated. honestly? if everybody else did end up looping to plato, i'd be pretty interested to see the process by which they did so.

awesome, i've noted all of your recommendations. i spent a few hours in the university library today having a look at the philosophy section and came to the same conclusion - the general character of the philosopher's method of enquiry is so fascinating as a whole that i don't think that i'd be satisfied just sticking to my own niche. thanks for the advice, user

I definitely did. There's some Emerson quote from (I think) his private diaries, where he says that Plato's dialogues is one of the few books you could read "for a thousand years by a stream in Paradise." Always remember that.

Just always keep an open mind user, if you ever get bogged down in any "system" start to doubt yourself in a gentle way. Frankly I'm jealous someone with the knowhow to do physics at a high level is going to study philosophy. I study philosophy and I desperately want to learn math/physics, sort of the opposite of your situation. What I really want to do is revitalize Naturphilosophie but on a higher and less naive level than the first time around, not even tied to any one system or set of metaphysical principles, just the general love that the romantics had for nature, and the complete optimism they had about how the highest science would necessarily be the highest mysticism. There's this bit in the beginning of Stapledon's Last and First Men:

"In your day you have learnt to calculate something of the magnitudes of time and space. But to grasp my theme in its true proportions, it is necessary to do more than calculate. It is necessary to brood upon these magnitudes, to draw out the mind toward them, to feel the littleness of your here and now, and of the moment of civilization which you call history. You cannot hope to image, as we do, such vast proportions as one in a thousand million, because your sense-organs, and therefore your perceptions, are too coarse-grained to discriminate so small a fraction of their total field. But you may at least, by mere contemplation, grasp more constantly and firmly the significance of your calculations.

Men of your day, when they look back into the history of their planet, remark not only the length of time but also the bewildering acceleration of life's progress. Almost stationary in the earliest period of the earth's career, in your moment it seems headlong. Mind in you, it is said, not merely stands higher than ever before in respect of percipience, knowledge, insight, delicacy of admiration, and sanity of will, but also it moves upward century by century ever more swiftly. What next? Surely, you think, there will come a time when there will be no further heights to conquer.

This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise precipices and snow-fields. The mental and spiritual advances which, in your day, mind in the solar system has still to attempt, are overwhelmingly more complex, more precarious and dangerous, than those which have already been achieved. And though in certain humble respects you have attained full development, the loftier potencies of the spirit in you have not yet even begun to put forth buds."

To clarify, by "always remember that" I meant that I always remember that, not a condescending imperative to "Always remember that!"

Also good luck with your PhD studies user, and congrats.

>pic related

Should be required reading for anyone going into the "sciences"

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Dawkins is complementing philosophy, saying that we shouldn't take things at face value and inspect the reasoning and meaning of things deeply.

>Other 3 have tons of theories to mock about
>decide to mock Latatos
Why