I stumbled across two very interesting books this summer (both available for free online):

1. David MacKay, Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (available here)
2. James P. Sethna, Entropy, Order Parameters and Complexity (here)

They remind me of the program that Graham postulated in How To Do Philosophy: start with the useful and crank up the generality.  For what I absorbed of them, the ideas covered appear to be both rigorous and with myriad interdisciplinary applications, something that can rarely be said about a more standard philosophical text.  It’s somewhat disturbing that I can’t think of a class at Amherst that would use either MacKay or Sethna as a textbook…