I think there is no simple or objective way to determine this (say, by counting cites in Google Scholar) for the simple reasons, first, that what counts as a good work of philosophy depends on the exact reasons why you wish to read philosophy in the first place and, second, that there are many, many different reasons why someone might want to study philosophy in a serious way. As an example, let's consider the value of historical texts. One way to understand the value of a particular thinker or of a particular work is to understand its historical context (was the thinker or text addressing problems that it was important to answer at that time, and in a manner that engaged other significant thinkers and texts in important ways?) and historical legacy (did the thinker or text influence significantly future work on important philosophical issues). If you, as a reader, are especially interested in the "local history" of a particular philosophical concept or question or problem as it was understood at a...

Paul Feyerabend's Against Method is extremely lively andinteresting, those perhaps more challenging than the others onThomas's list. If you are interested in an historical perspective,these two books are readable, interesting, and relatively concise:G.E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science.

The answer to your first question about preconceptions is that scientists are human beings and so scientific practice is affected in many ways by human subjectivity. These effects include, but are not limited to, a human tendency towards dogmatisim. Scientific methods and training can limit the damaging effects of human dogmatism, but cannot eliminate them entirely. The answer is your second quetsion about intelligent design is that there are substantive scientific reasons for rejecting this argument for God's existence. Ironically, your assumption that scientists' failure to accept this arguments can only be due to unscientific dogmatism may be based on your own wishful or dogmatic thinking -- it is a mistake to think that the best or even the typical scientific response to the argument from design is dismissing it as a childish myth. Finally, my sense is that scientists and philosopers have explored and assessed this argument from mutliple perspectives, so I think the rational investigation...

Certainly scientists make epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and methodological assumptions that affect their work. Historians and philosophers of scientists have discussed this quite a bit, and so have sociologists of science. Although determing the exact content of these assumptions is too complicated and too controversial an endeavor for there to be a comprehensive non-controversial list, many specific examples have been proposed and debated. Panelists who work in this area can provide their own favorite examples and references, but if you have not read much about what philosophjers have said about this I recommend Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's engaging historical study Leviathan and the Air-Pump and Thomas Kuhn's classic contemporary study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . You are right that similar types of assumptions affect all of us in varied and sometimes profound ways. For an engaging study of this topic in a wider context than the practice of science, I find...

Kant thought he had a strong answer to Hume, but this answer requires embracing a strange metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism that few have found palatable. Kant' s best discussions of this occurs in his Critique of Pure Reason . Suppose, however, that we reject "strange" answers like Kant's idealism, and suppose we also admit that we cannot prove that the laws of physics will remain unchanged in the future. There may still be strong reasons why we ought to believe that the laws of physics will be invariant, for example because this belief is necessary for motivating people to be moral or for motivating humans to conduct scientific investigations of the world. There are strands of both strands of argumentation--the "strange" idealistic one and the "practical" one about human motivation--in Kant's discussion of the systematicity of nature and the regulative use of reason in the first introduction to the Critique of Judgment.