It’s half term week, and I’ve spent a peaceful half hour this morning, before embarking on the long process of waking up my teenager, meandering down the bosky by-ways of the internet. It took me, via Philip Ball’s blog post on a new book on the uncertainty principle ([amazon_link id=”0393067920″ target=”_blank” ]The Quantum Moment[/amazon_link] by Robert Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber), to the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy’s entry on John Dewey: “He is probably the only philosopher in this Encyclopaedia to have published both on the Treaty of Versailles and on the value of displaying art in post offices.” This is highly promising.

[amazon_image id=”0393067920″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Quantum Moment – How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty[/amazon_image]

Dewey is someone who has always sounded appealing in fact, but is somehow a terrible gap in my knowledge. Which of his books should I start with? [amazon_link id=”0809311623″ target=”_blank” ]The Quest for Certainty[/amazon_link] (1929) appeals, but so does [amazon_link id=”0804002541″ target=”_blank” ]The Public and Its Problems[/amazon_link] (1927), especially having just read about Walter Lippmann. The internet obviously favours [amazon_link id=”1614272204″ target=”_blank” ]How We Think[/amazon_link]. Advice welcome.

[amazon_image id=”0271055707″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry[/amazon_image]