New Books in Philosophy Podcast

Jean Kazez, “The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbrin...

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Ron Mallon, “The Construction of Human Kinds” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play importan...

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Alfred Moore, “Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Pl...

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Jan De Winter, “Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, phil...

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Kristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-c...

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Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in ...

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Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a num...

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Justin Snedegar, “Contrastive Reasons” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explici...

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Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, the...

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Peter Balint, “Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity” (Oxford University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The freedoms prized and secured in a modern liberal democratic societies give rise to significant forms of moral and social diversity. In many cases, these forms of diversity must be dealt with by ...

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David Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea...

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Linda Zagzebski, “Exemplarist Moral Theory” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of the longstanding debates in moral philosophy concern the question of where more theorizing should begin. Some hold that moral theories should start with definitions of moral terms like good...

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Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmenta...

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Cristina Bicchieri, “Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the clo...

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Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different ve...

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Ryan Muldoon, “Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that a political order derives its authority, legitimacy, and justification from some kind of initial agreement or contract, whether hypothetical or tacit, has been a mainstay of political...

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Carl Gillett, “Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sid...

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Fred Feldman, “Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The philosopher (and 1972 presidential candidate) John Hospers once wrote, “justice is getting what one deserves. What could be simpler?” As it turns out, this seemingly simple idea is in the opini...

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Jennifer Greenwood, “Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality” (MIT, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usua...

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Elizabeth Barnes, “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a...

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Andy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the ...

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William H. Shaw, “Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On any mature view, war is horrific. Naturally, there is a broad range of fundamental ethical questions regarding war. According to most moral theories, war is nonetheless sometimes permitted, and ...

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Paul C. Taylor, “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics” (Wiley Blackwell, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of th...

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J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not un...

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Kenneth Schaffner, “Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care?” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how comp...

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Martha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In...

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Silvia Jonas, “Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is a long history in philosophy, art and religion of claims about the ineffable from The One in Plotinus to Kant’s noumena or thing-in-itself to Wittgenstein’s famous remark at the end of Tra...

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Diana Heney, “Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pragmatist tradition in philosophy tends to focus on the pioneering work of its founding trio of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, who together proposed and developed a distinctive...

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Arianna Betti, “Against Facts” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell claimed it is a truism that there are facts: the planets revolve around the sun, 2 + 2 = 4, elephants are bigger than mice. In Against Facts (M...

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Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But ad...

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Julian Reiss, “Causation, Evidence and Inference” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do we mean when we claim that something is a cause of something else that smoking causes cancer, that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused World War I, that the 8-ball caused the oth...

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David Shoemaker, “Responsibility from the Margins” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral life is infused with emotionally-charged interactions. When a stranger carelessly steps on my foot, I not only feel pain in my foot, I also am affronted by her carelessness. Whereas the forme...

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Rachel McKinnon, “The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant” (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the important ways we use language is to make assertions – roughly, to pass on information we believe to be true to others. Insofar as we need to learn by means of what others they tell us, ...

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Duncan Pritchard, “Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many are introduced to philosophy by way of a confrontation with the kind of radical skepticism associated with Rene Descartes: Might I right now be dreaming? Might everything I think I know be the...

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Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and my...

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Brian Epstein, “The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? ...

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Leif Wenar, “Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other device...

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David J. Stump, “Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since Kant argued that there was a category of truths, the synthetic a priori, that grounded the possibility of empirical knowledge, philosophers have debated the concept of a priori knowledge...

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Rivka Weinberg, “The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May be Permissible” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We don’t commonly think of procreation as a moral issue. But why not? When you think about it, creating another person seems like a morally weighty thing to do. And we tend to think that procreatio...

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Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nothing seems so obviously true as the claim that pains feel bad, that pain and suffering go together. Almost as obviously, it seems that the function of pain is to inform us of tissue damage. In W...

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S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circu...

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Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it becom...

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Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the d...

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Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nan...

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Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there in...

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Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should inform...

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Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social ...

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M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in...

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Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s a...

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Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word?...

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Max Deutsch, “The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method” (MIT, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is a movement in contemporary philosophy known as “experimental philosophy” or “x-phi” for short. It proceeds against the backdrop of a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy. According...

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Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, econom...

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Kevin Vallier, “Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a liberal democracy, citizens share political power as equals. This means that they must decide laws and policies collectively. Yet they disagree about fundamental questions regarding the value,...

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Helen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural History of Natural Theology” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent Un...

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L. A. Paul, “Transformative Experience” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We typically make decisions based on a projection of their likely outcome with respect to the things we value. We seek to maximize of enhance the things we think are good, and minimize what we thin...

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M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position...

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Jason Stanley, “How Propaganda Works” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and im...

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Wayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try t...

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George Sher, “Equality for Inegalitarians” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a longstanding debate in political philosophy regarding the fundamental point or aim of justice. According to one prominent view, the point of justice is to neutralize the influence of luck...

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Marya Schechtman, “Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is it to be the same person over time? The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke approached this question from a forensic standpoint: persons are identified over time with an appropriate...

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Seana Shiffrin, “Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by...

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Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on th...

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Carol Gould, “Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller. It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan....

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Erik C. Banks, “The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified wi...

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Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking” (Oxford, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speec...

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Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition:...

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Claudio Lopez-Guerra, “Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requi...

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Eric Steinhart, “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” (Palgrave Macmillan) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digit...

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Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking ...

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Stephen Yablo, “Aboutness” (Princeton UP, 2014 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A day after Stephen Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained, “You never take me for ice cream any more.” Yablo initially responded that this was obviously false. ...

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Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, the...

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Richard Fumerton, “Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When...

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Samuel Scheffler, “Death and the Afterlife” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giv...

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Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations...

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Elise Springer, “Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The long tradition of moral philosophy employs a familiar collection of basic concepts. These include concepts like agent, act, intention, consequence, responsibility, obligation, the right, and th...

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Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea ha...

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Simon Blackburn, “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the heart of our moral thinking lies trouble with our selves. The self lies at morality’s core; selves are intimately connected to the proper objects of moral evaluation. But a common theme of...

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Jakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes t...

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Mark Alfano, “Character as Moral Fiction” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character. Aristotle stands at the head of this ...

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Melinda B. Fagan, “Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology: Knowledge in Flesh and Blood” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”....

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Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, “Epistemic Paternalism: A Defence” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of our goals and aspirations in life depend upon our epistemological capabilities. Our attempts to do the right thing or live a good life can be greatly hampered if we are unable to form true...

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Adrienne Martin, “How We Hope: A Moral Psychology” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From political campaigns to sports stadiums and hospital rooms, the concept of hope is pervasive. And the story we tend to tell ourselves about hope is that it is intrinsically a good thing — in ma...

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Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers...

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David Edmonds, “Would You Kill the Fat Man?” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The trolley problem is a staple of contemporary moral philosophy. It centers around two scenarios involving a runaway trolley. In the first, a trolley is barreling down a track without any brakes...

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Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kans...

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Joseph Carens, “The Ethics of Immigration” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is commonly assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who mu...

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Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a ware...

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Michael Huemer, “The Problem of Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The philosopher Robert Nozick once claimed that the most basic question of Political Philosophy is “Why not Anarchy?” Political philosophers pose this question often with the intent of demonstratin...

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Regina Rini, "The Ethics of Microaggression" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seemingly fleeting and barely legible insults, slights, and derogations might seem morally insignificant. They’re the byproducts of ordinary thoughtlessness and insensitivity; moreover, insofar as ...

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Jennifer A. McMahon, “Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Art and ethics are linked philosophically by the fact that they are both fall under value theory; and some aestheticians, notably Berys Gaut, have argued for a direct connection between aesthetic a...

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Paul Goldin, "The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Goldin's book The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton UP, 2020) provides an unmatched introduction to eight of the most important works of classica...

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R. Jay Wallace, “The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret” (Oxford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our pa...

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John Campbell, "Causation in Psychology" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or a fear for one’s s...

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Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to ...

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Helene Landemore, “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re all familiar with the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a form...

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Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t hav...

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Simon Keller, “Partiality” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our moral lives are shaped by a deep commitment to the moral equality of all persons. This thought drives us to think, for example, that each person’s life is of equal moral importance, that each ...

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Michael Marder, “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin”, a “zone of a...

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Jody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language. This view has it that communication proceeds lar...

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Carlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed l...

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Thom Brooks, “Punishment” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules. And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced. Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break t...

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Berit Brogaard, “Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-eval...

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Christopher Hookway, “The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that h...

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Julia Tanney, “Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is fair to say that philosophy of mind and the sciences of the mind quite generally adhere to an information-processing model of cognition. A standard version holds that there are events going o...

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Kimberley Brownlee, “Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When confronted with a law that they find morally unconscionable, citizens sometimes engage in civil disobedience – they publicly break the law with a view to communicating their judgment that it i...

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Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen ...

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Philip Pettit, “On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In political philosophy, republicanism is the name of a distinctive framework for thinking about politics. At its core is a unique conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in non-d...

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Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, “The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the very many puzzling aspects of the physical world is this: how do we explain the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are time-asymmetric while those of statistical mechanics are time-symm...

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Cheryl Misak, “The American Pragmatists” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pragmatism is American’s home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood. This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest propone...

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Jesse J. Prinz, “The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while ...

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Roslyn Weiss, “Philosophers in the Republic” (Cornell UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary philosophers still wrestle mightily with Plato’s Republic. A common reading has it that in the Republic, Plato’s character Socrates defends a conception of justice according to which r...

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Beth Preston, “A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many philosophers have written on the ways in which human beings produce artifacts and on the nature of artifacts themselves, often distinguishing the act of producing or making from growing, and d...

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Clayton Littlejohn, “Justification and the Truth-Connection” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is a long-standing debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification. Internalists think that a belief is justified in virtue of certain facts internal to the b...

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Herman Cappelen, “Philosophy Without Intuitions” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s taken for granted among analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry – ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, in particular – involve a speci...

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Brian Leiter, “Why Tolerate Religion?” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Religious conviction enjoys a privileged status in our society.This is perhaps most apparent in legal contexts, where religious conviction is often given special consideration. To be more precise, ...

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Alva Noe, “Varieties of Presence” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do we experience we look at an object – say, a tomato? A traditional view holds that we entertain an internal picture or representation of the tomato, and moreover that this internal picture i...

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Corey Brettschneider, “When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Liberal democracies are in the business of protecting individuals and their rights. Central among these are the rights to free expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience. Liberal...

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Miguel de Beistegui, “Aesthetics after Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor” (Routledge, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the nature of art? The question involves understanding the relation between art and reality and what we are expressing in art. Miguel de Beistegui, professor of philosophy at the University...

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Jamie Kelly, “Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic Theory” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Plato famously argued that democracy is nearly the worst form of government because citizens are decidedly unwise. Many styles of democratic theory have tried to meet Plato’s argument by denying th...

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Jill Gordon, “Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s traditional in Plato scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways. One common division is a temporal one that distinguishes among early, middle and late dialogues. Another is by content...

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Nicole Hassoun, “Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-...

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Kristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simu...

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Paul Weithman, “Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are...

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Lee Braver, “Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are both considered among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Both were born in 1889 in German-speaking countries; both studied unde...

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Anthony Laden, “Reasoning: A Social Picture” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a view familiar to philosophers, reasoning is a process that occurs within an individual mind and is aimed specifically at demonstrating on the basis of statement that we accept the co...

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Helen Steward, “A Metaphysics for Freedom” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The basic problem of free will is quite simple to pose: do we ever act freely? One of the traditional “no” answers comes from the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that everything...

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Kok-Chor Tan, “Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justice requires that each person gets what he or she deserves. Luck is a matter of good or bad things simply befalling people; hence luck distributes to people things they do not deserve. Justice ...

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Paul Morrow, "Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The moral horrors of genocide and mass atrocity lead us to wonder how such things are even possible. A common and understandable reaction is to see events of this kind as arising from the collapse ...

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Eric Marcus, “Rational Causation” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often explain actions and beliefs by citing the reasons for which they are done or believed. The reason I took off my hat at the funeral was because I was paying respect to the deceased. The rea...

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David Chai, "Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and ...

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Elizabeth Brake, “Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable...

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Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of histori...

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Michael Lynch, “In Praise of Reason” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modern society seems in awe of the advances of science and technology. We commonly praise innovations that enable us to live longer and more comfortable lives, we look forward to the release of new...

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Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 201...

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Karen Stohr, “On Manners” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We rarely stop to notice that our everyday social interactions are governed by a highly complex system of rules. Though often only implicit, there are rules governing how to board an elevator, how ...

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Uriah Kriegel, “The Sources of Intentionality” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about you...

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Allen Buchanan, “Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very huma...

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Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinki...

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John Christman, “The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In theorizing justice, equality, freedom, authority, and the like, political philosophers often rely tacitly upon particular conceptions of the self and individual autonomy. Traditional forms of li...

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Crawford (Tim) Elder, “Familiar Objects and their Shadows” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really ex...

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Robert Audi, “Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals. Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal. This requires, in part, ...

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Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of...

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Fabienne Peter, “Democratic Legitimacy” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The quip reveals an interesting dimension of democracy: it’s hard to beat, but it’s also hard to lov...

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Troy Jollimore, “Love’s Vision” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Love – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go ...

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Jason Brennan, “The Ethics of Voting” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is commonly held that citizens in a democratic society have a civic duty to participate in the processes of collective self-government. Often, this duty is held to be satisfied by voting. In fac...

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Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically bee...

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Elizabeth Anderson, “The Imperative of Integration” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Demographic data show that the United States is a heavily segregated society, especially when it comes to relations among African-Americans and whites. The de facto segregation that prevails in the...

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Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or...

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Sanford Goldberg, “Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access. What...

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Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the yea...

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Gerald Gaus, “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bound World” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If we are to have a society at all, it seems that we must recognize and abide by certain rules concerning our interactions with others. And in recognizing such rules, we must take ourselves to some...

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Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skept...

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William P. Seeley, "Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), Willia...

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Serena Parekh, "No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discourse in wealthy Western countries about refugees tends to follow a familiar script. How many refugees is a country morally required to accept? What kinds of care and support are host countries...

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Ann-Sophie Barwich, "Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Smells repel and attract; they bring emotionally charged memories to mind; they guide behavior and thought nonconsciously; they give food much of its taste; and the loss of sense of smell can help ...

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Lisa Bortolotti, "The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is something intuitive about the idea that when we believe, we ought to follow our evidence. This entails that beliefs that are the products of garden varieties of irrationality, such as delu...

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Beata Stawarska, "Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: 'The Course in General Linguistics' after a Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: The Course in General Linguistics after a Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Beata Stawarska guides us to consider Ferdinand de Saussur...

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David Livingstone Smith, "On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It" (Oxford UP 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The phenomenon of dehumanization is associated with such atrocities as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust in World War II. In these and other cases, people are described in ways that imp...

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Bo Mou, "Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contributors to?Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and seman...

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Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore many types of...

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Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, "Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a...

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Cressida J. Heyes, "Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we think about the relationship between subjectivity and experience? In Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), Cressida J. Heyes appro...

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Robert Pippin, "Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Pippin's book Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is a work in the philosophy of film published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Each cha...

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Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone, a larger object is larger than a smaller object...

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Frank Wilderson III, "Afropessimism" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate ...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Ilya Somin, "Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of democracy, we typically think of voting; and when we think of voting, we ordinarily have elections and campaigns in minds. In this intuitive sense, voting is a matter of casting a ...

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Santiago Zabala, "Being at Large: Freedom in the Ago of Alternative Facts" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, questions around the nature of ?truth ?and ?facts have reentered public debate, often in discussions around journalistic bias, and whether politically neutral reporting is possible...

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Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette, "Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosophy" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This ground-breaking work on Indian philosophical doxography examines the function of dialectical texts within their intellectual and religious milieu. In Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosop...

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B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emot...

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Adrian Johnston, "Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy " (Northwestern UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the contemporary philosophical landscape, a variety of materialist ontologies have appeared, all wrestling with various political and philosophical questions in light of a post-God ontology. Ent...

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Dominik Finkelde, "Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics" (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it’s the question that animates Dominik F...

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Emily Thomas, "The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Travel has been a topic lurking in the background (at least) of a lot of philosophy. Socrates was keen to remind his jury as well as his interlocutor Phaedrus that he had spent nearly his entirely ...

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Peter Adamson, "Classical Indian Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri survey both the breadth and depth of Indian philosophical traditions. Their odyssey touches on the ...

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Shay Welch, "The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing with Native American Epistemology (Palgrave Macmillian, 2019), Shay Welch investigates the phenomenological ways that dance choreogr...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Peter Carruthers, "Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do nonhuman animals have phenomenally conscious mental states? For example, do they have the types of conscious experiences we have when, in our case, we experience the smell of cinnamon or the red...

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Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo, "Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson?" (Zero Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2016, Jordan Peterson, a relatively obscure professor of psychology, released several videos on YouTube making critical remarks on political correctness and related political legislation. This w...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Zahi Zalloua, "?Žižek on Race: Towards an Anti-Racist Future?" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek’s prolific quips on various cultural and political issues around race and related issues, found either in short YouTube clips or lengthy b...

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Todd McGowan, "Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dia...

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Amy Reed-Sandoval, "Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020), Amy Reed-Sandoval reframes the question of immigration justice by focusing on the historical development ...

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Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scientific proposition we can’t elaborate or do anythin...

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Richard Polt, "Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the p...

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David Estlund, "Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is tempting to hold that any proposed principle of social justice is defective if it demands too much of people, given their proclivities. A stronger view, one that many philosophers find attrac...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Megan Burke, "When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexa...

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Chenyang Wang, "Subjectivity In-Between Times: Exploring the Notion of Time in Lacan's Work" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you thought Jacques Lacan’s essay on "Logical Time" was the psychoanalyst’s final word on the subject, then this interview has a lot to teach you! In his new book Subjectivity In-Between Times: ...

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Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the...

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Katherine Hawley, "How to Be Trustworthy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is obvious that in our day-to-day lives, a lot hangs on trust, and thus on whether those around us are trustworthy. Yet there are several philosophical issues surrounding trust and trustworthine...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Adrian Johnston, "A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome ?Less Than Nothing?, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation ?A...

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Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Consta...

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Manuel Heras Escribano, "The Philosophy of Affordances" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains. J. J...

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Frederick Beiser, "Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of yo...

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John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to...

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Adriel M. Trott, "Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation" (Edinburgh UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Adriel M. Trott argues for understanding the relationship of matter and form in Aristotl...

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Peter Adamson, "Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 3" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is no easy task to survey and present a comprehensive history of philosophy of an entire intellectual tradition to a broad public audience without compromising on the scholarly rigor demanded by...

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Christopher Peacocke, "The Primacy of Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A basic question in mind and metaphysics is the relation between the nature of mental content (or meaning) and the nature of the domains of entities and relations to which those contents refer or w...

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Julia Maskivker, "The Duty to Vote" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When asked what democracy is, many of us instantly think of elections, and thus voting. Although we tend to see voting as central to democracy, we also think that voting is optional – a commendable...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Robert Talisse, "Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing D...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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Elijah Millgram, "John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life. John Stuart Mill’s ...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Dilek Huseyinzadegan, "Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics" (Northwestern UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Dilek Huseyinzadegan analyzes Kant’s political writings by attending to the role of history, anthropology, and geography...

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Justin Garson, "What Biological Functions are and Why They Matter" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do zebras have stripes? One way to answer that question is ask what function stripes play in the lives of zebras – for example, to deter disease-carrying flies from biting them. This notion of ...

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Axel Seemann, "The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. Often this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the su...

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Malcolm Keating, "Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philosophy of Language was a central concern in classical Indian Philosophy. Philosophers in the tradition discussed testimony, pragmatics, and the religious implications of language, among other ...

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Chiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, ...

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Amy Olberding, "The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a...

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Patricia Marino, "Philosophy of Sex and Love" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For those who think that philosophy must speak to everyday experience and ordinary life, it would seem that philosophical questions occasioned by love and sex should take center stage. Moral, epis...

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John T. Lysaker, "Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between the form of writing and what can be thought? How is a writer’s thinking shaped by form? How is a reader’s? Does this matter for philosophy? In Philosophy, Writing, ...

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Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. Thi...

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Quassim Cassam, "Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. And sometimes they are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe – broadly, their ...

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Susanna Schellenberg, "The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does perception result in thoughts about items in the world (such as dogs or flowers) and in conscious states of many kinds (such as experiences of seeing red)? How does perception provide evid...

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Christian List, "Why Free Will is Real" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible? That is the classical problem of free will. Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of f...

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Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of r...

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Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the syst...

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Mary Kate McGowan, "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re all familiar with the ways in which speech can cause harm. For example, speech can incite wrongful acts. And I suppose we’re also familiar with contexts in which a person who occupies a posit...

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James Doyle, "No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the centennial year of the birth of G.E.M. Anscombe, one of the major philosophical figures of the 20th century within the analytic tradition. A close associate of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ansc...

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Mollie Gerver, "The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation" (U Edinburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral and political theorists have paid a healthy amount of attention to states’ rights to determine who may reside within their territory. Accordingly, there’s a large literature on immigration, ...

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Jill Stauffer, "Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard" (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (Columbia University Press 2015, paperback 2018), Jill Stauffer argues that survivors of unjust treatment and dehumanization can experience f...

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T. J. Kasperbauer, "Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Non-human animals are companions, research subjects, creatures we fear, creatures we eat. Why do we put other animals in the various categories we do, and treat them in the various good and bad way...

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Michael Hannon, "What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Epistemologists working traditional modes have sought to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one has knowledge. This has led to several tricky philosophical problems. Per...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Elizabeth Schechter, "Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Human brains have two hemispheres whose major connection is the corpus callosum, which enables information to be shared between the hemispheres. Split-brain subjects are people whose corpus callosu...

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Guy Axtell, "Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement" (Lexington, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our lives are shot through with contingency – where, when, and into what circumstances we are born is largely a matter of chance. And yet those features play determining roles in our lives. The lan...

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Ethan Mills, "Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa" (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Skepticism has a long history in the Western tradition, from Pyrrhonian Skepticism in the Hellenistic period to more contemporary forms of skepticism most often used as foils to theories of knowled...

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Jonathan Birch, "The Philosophy of Social Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems to go against evolutionary theory for an individual to give up its own chances at reproducing in order to increase the fitness of others. Yet social behavior is found throughout nature, fr...

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Henry S. Richardson, "Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even those among us who think that morality is rooted in timeless normative truths will acknowledge that the overall moral fabric that binds us to one another is subject to various kinds of renovat...

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Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait ...

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Samuel Schindler, "Theoretical Virtues in Science: Discovering Reality Through Theory" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A fundamental problem in science, and in philosophy of science, is that of theory choice. Scientists propose theories to explain data, but when two scientific theories can both explain the same dat...

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Carrie Figdor, "Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re all familiar with cases where one attributes certain psychological states or capacities to creatures and systems that are not human persons. For example, your cat might prefer a certain vari...

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Shannon Spaulding, “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” (Routledge, 2018)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social cognition includes the ways we explain, predict, interpret, and influence other people. The dominant philosophical theories of social cognition–the theory-theory and the simulation theory–ha...

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David Rondel, “Pragmatist Egalitarianism” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pragmatism is a longstanding philosophical idiom that advocates public-facing philosophy – philosophy that abandons merely academic puzzles and addresses itself to the social and political problems...

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Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view ...

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Candice Delmas, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a long tradition in political philosophy, there are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by a legitimate political authority. That is, it is commo...

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Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theorie...

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Shelley Tremain, “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand disability? In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Dr. Shelley Tremain explores this complex question from the perspective ...

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Brian O’Connor, “Idleness: A Philosophical Essay” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Culturally, idleness is widely derided as laziness, uselessness, and sloth. Even within philosophy, the idle are criticized for being wasteful, selfish, and free-loading. Indeed, throughout the hi...

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Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of...

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Steven Gimbel, “Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions...

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C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nyugen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, our capacity to set goals and pursue them. In Game...

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Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperat...

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Zena Hitz, "Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We live in a culture that tends to view thought with a degree of suspicion. Thinking is frequently associated with uselessness, idleness, laziness. These suspicions can be somewhat allayed when thi...

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Elizabeth F. Cohen, “The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re all familiar with some of the ways that time figures into our political environment. Things such as term limits, waiting periods, deadlines, and criminal sentences readily come to mind. But...

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Edouard Machery, “Philosophy Within Proper Bounds” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are five people on the track and a runaway trolley that will hit them, and you are on a footbridge over the track with a large person whose body can stop the trolley in its tracks. Should you...

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William A. Edmundson, “John Rawls: Reticent Socialist” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of ju...

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Ruth G. Millikan, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan res...

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Christian B. Miller, “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My guest today is Christian Miller. Christian is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is a moral philosopher specializing on character, with special interest in the emp...

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Alexus McLeod, “Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexingt...

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Gloria Origgi, “Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all put a great deal of care into protecting, managing, and monitoring our reputation. But the precise nature of a reputation is obscure. In one sense, reputation is merely hearsay, a popular pe...

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Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religio...

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Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perception...

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Bart Streumer, “Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgments” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are mu...

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Sam Cowling, “Abstract Entities” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s a true sentence: The number seven is odd. What’s philosophically odd about the sentence is that it seems to imply that there must be numbers, including the number seven just as the truth of ...

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Kieran Setiya, “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Middle-agedness is a curious phenomenon. In many ways, one is at one’s peak and also at the early stages of decline. There is much to do, but also dozens of paths irretrievably untaken. Successes, ...

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Owen Flanagan, “The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by ...

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Daniel R. DeNicola, “Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know” (The MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be ...

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Susanna Siegel, “The Rationality of Perception” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Neverthele...

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Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2011-06-15T15:03:09

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skept...

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Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2011-06-15T15:03:09

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skept...

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Podcasts by New Books in Philosophy

All episodes

Jean Kazez, “The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ron Mallon, “The Construction of Human Kinds” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alfred Moore, “Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jan De Winter, “Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin Snedegar, “Contrastive Reasons” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Balint, “Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity” (Oxford University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Linda Zagzebski, “Exemplarist Moral Theory” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cristina Bicchieri, “Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ryan Muldoon, “Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Gillett, “Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fred Feldman, “Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Greenwood, “Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality” (MIT, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Barnes, “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William H. Shaw, “Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul C. Taylor, “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics” (Wiley Blackwell, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kenneth Schaffner, “Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care?” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Silvia Jonas, “Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Diana Heney, “Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arianna Betti, “Against Facts” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julian Reiss, “Causation, Evidence and Inference” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Shoemaker, “Responsibility from the Margins” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel McKinnon, “The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant” (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Duncan Pritchard, “Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Epstein, “The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leif Wenar, “Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David J. Stump, “Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rivka Weinberg, “The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May be Permissible” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Max Deutsch, “The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method” (MIT, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin Vallier, “Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural History of Natural Theology” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

L. A. Paul, “Transformative Experience” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jason Stanley, “How Propaganda Works” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

George Sher, “Equality for Inegalitarians” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marya Schechtman, “Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seana Shiffrin, “Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carol Gould, “Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erik C. Banks, “The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking” (Oxford, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claudio Lopez-Guerra, “Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Steinhart, “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” (Palgrave Macmillan) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Yablo, “Aboutness” (Princeton UP, 2014 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Fumerton, “Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Samuel Scheffler, “Death and the Afterlife” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elise Springer, “Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simon Blackburn, “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393