There is also a long textbook being written on this topic by William J. Rapaport at the University of Buffalo. You could download the pre-release PDF from his website for free for quite a long time. Looking it up now it seems he’s officially published it through Wiley so that’s no longer the case; I remember it being very readable and including lots of fun quotes & comics (unsure how many of the latter survived intellectual property review during publishing): https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophy+of+Computer+Science%3A+An+Introduction+to+the+Issues+and+the+Literature-p-9781119891925
Anyway I read it because I became interested in the question “which physical objects are computers?” which eventually killed my naive Platonic idea that there is a way to carve up the physical world into categories based on necessary & sufficient conditions. Human language doesn’t work that way, and it would be more surprising if it were capable of the task than not!
There is also a long textbook being written on this topic by William J. Rapaport at the University of Buffalo. You could download the pre-release PDF from his website for free for quite a long time. Looking it up now it seems he’s officially published it through Wiley so that’s no longer the case; I remember it being very readable and including lots of fun quotes & comics (unsure how many of the latter survived intellectual property review during publishing): https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophy+of+Computer+Science%3A+An+Introduction+to+the+Issues+and+the+Literature-p-9781119891925
Anyway I read it because I became interested in the question “which physical objects are computers?” which eventually killed my naive Platonic idea that there is a way to carve up the physical world into categories based on necessary & sufficient conditions. Human language doesn’t work that way, and it would be more surprising if it were capable of the task than not!
The new version sounds like a really good read, added to my Wishlist!
Fwiw. There does appear to be links to a PDF of an older version on https://freecomputerbooks.com/Philosophy-of-Computer-Science.html and I grabbed a PDF to check out later
Yeah you can definitely also get it from archive.org for https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/philcs.html since he periodically posted the updated drafts.