Customer Reviews

Thinking As A Science

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is a book written by a brilliant young man in his early twenties, almost a century ago, but is still up to date. As such, it has a refreshing and bold style. His objective is to put the process of reasoning into a scientific framework by organizing different methods with which one can improve his/her thinking efficacy.

He provides a new perspective on concentration by defining it as the process of persistently moving towards a well-defined objective rather than fixating one's thought on a static object. He also provides interesting discussions on debate/conversation, prejudice/uncertainty, reading and writing to help thinking. His list of further reading material in the last chapter of the book is of great value, even a century after it was written, which also indicates the long lasting value of this great piece of work.

This book is my primary travel companion, and it succeeds in provoking new thoughts almost every time I skim through it. Thus, I recommend it to all those who wish to make better use of the "human machine" :)

PS - Later on (53 years after its publication), Hazlitt has written of his thoughts on how to improve upon this book. An outline of these thoughts are presented in "The wisdom of Henry Hazlitt", pp 45-78, which is available online at http://mises.org/books/wisdom.pdf

Thinking As A Science has an excellent chapter on concentration. It also has some wonderful insights as to how we think and how we can improve our thinking. The downside of the book is that the beginning chapters are somewhat boring b/c they deal with methods of thinking that are very scientific. But once you reach the concentration chapter the book is great.

Thinking as a Science by Henry Hazlitt, (who is mostly famous for the book Economics in One Lesson) was written when his was only 20 years old. Quite an impressive achievement.

Have you ever thought about how you should read a book and what is the best method in by which knowledge can be obtained from it? In Thinking as a Science, Hazlitt provides some great answers (and practical methods) exactly for such questions. The chapter "Thinking and Reading" is quite illuminating and highly recommended for the serious reader. Only this chapter is well worth the entire book.

Although, overall this book is far from being perfect, a few chapters in the book are worth the time and a lot of good thinking techniques can be obtained from them .As a follow-up, highly recommended reading is Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive by William Stanley Jevons.

I have read the first 100 pages (over half the book) and found no spelling errors (retort to other reviews). It is engaging, focused, and instructive about what constitutes thinking.

From web page of company that published this book :
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. " Result of this is unreadable book.

This book is a rambling, unreadable mess, so filled with typos it seems impossible to believe that any human ever actually proofread it.