Vasilios Spanos Spanos itibaren Aire Libre, Pue., Mexico
Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, their father figure Karl Popper, and their adjunct Thomas Kuhn - it's hard not to think of these four philosophers as being of a piece, even (especially?) when they disagree, because their disagreements were usually so exceedingly affectionate. So reading the correspondence between Lakatos and Feyerabend is peeking into the workaday lives of a cadre of philosophers. They talk about womanizing, Berkeley politics, travel, conferences, etc. They also talk about their philosophical concerns (mostly the effectiveness of science as a predictive tool, its simliarities/dissimilarities with other ways of knowing, its cultural uniqueness in the West) in these sometimes unprompted, unrehearsed and underdigested letters. The upside is you can read Lakatos's masterpiece Proofs and Refutations all day and never quite understand what's behind the text, but here, he just lays it all out. You also get a portrait of the firebrand Feyerabend as a middle-aged wonk that is pretty contrary to all the molotov cocktail-throwing in his published writings. The downside is that a lot of this correspondence is really boring. For people who are interested in Popper and his philosophical progeny, this may be valuable. For others, these are not the droids you're looking for.
Kind of a let down after the gentle narrative curve of All The Pretty Horses and the brilliant prose of The Crossing, it was still a solid closing of the Border Trilogy.