New Books in Philosophy
374 episodes - English - Latest episode: 22 days ago - ★★★★ - 107 ratingsInterview with Philosophers about their New Books
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Episodes
Johanna Oksala, "Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology" (Northwestern UP, 2023)
June 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCan capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be m...
Cameron J. Buckner, "From Deep Learning to Rational Machines" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourArtificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp contrast, today's artificial neural networks – deep learning – are able to learn from experience, and perform at human-like levels of perceptual categorization, language production, and other cognitive abilities at h. This difference has been portrayed as roughly parallel to the philosophical divide between rationalists or nativists on the one h...
Ronald R. Sundstrom, "Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentr...
Christine Abigail L. Tan, "Freedom's Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang's Zhuangzhi" (SUNY Press, 2024)
May 21, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesChristine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of co...
Luis H. H. Favela, "The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment" (Routledge, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesEcological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience. In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays o...
J. P. Messina, "Private Censorship" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhen we think of censorship, our minds might turn to state agencies exercising power to silence dissent. However, contemporary concerns about censorship arise in contexts where non-state actors suppress expression and communication. There are subtle and not-so-subtle forms of interference that come from social groups, employers, media corporations, and even search engines. Should these “new” forms of censorship alarm us? Should we assess them in ways that mirror our typical views about state-...
Emily S. Lee, "A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-In-Difference" (Lexington Books, 2024)
April 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHow can we understand the changing power of race and gender to shape our reality? How shared is reality? Can narratives of experience help us develop these analyses? What role does embodiment play in shaping experience? In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference (Lexington Books, 2024), Emily S. Lee uses the tools of critical phenomenology to deeply engage with the theoretical work of women of color to approach these questions. Through reconstructing pheno...
Eric Schwitzgebel, "The Weirdness of the World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, const...
Stephen Phillips, "The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Adi-Sakara on the Isa Upanisad" (Bloombury, 2024)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara’s analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara’s commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questi...
Jon Robson, "Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Such pessimists about aesthetic testimony hold that facts about aesthetic properties – such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy, or Picasso's Guernica being anti-war – can't be transmitted by testimony, and can only be learned through first-person experience. In Aesthetic Testimony: An Opti...
Charlotte Witt, "Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn our day-to-day lives, we are subject to normative requirements, obligations, and expectations that originate in the social roles we occupy. For example, professors ought to pursue the truth, while parents ought to be supportive of their children. What’s interesting is that these role-specific requirements seem to befall us. We do not choose them. This raises the puzzle of what accounts for their normativity. In Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms (Oxford University Press 2023), C...
Rebecca Roache, "For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSwearing can be a powerful communicative act, for good or ill. The same word can incite violence or increase intimacy. How is swearing so multivalent in its power? Is it just all those harsh “c” and “k” sounds? Does swearing take its power from taboo meaning? Why is swearing sometimes so funny? In For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (Oxford University Press, 2023), Rebecca Roache, host of the podcast The Academic Imperfectionist, offers us rich insights into the complex i...
Michael Devitt, "Biological Essentialism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhat makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a species shared. Individuals belonged to a species by possessing this essence. Biologists and philosophers of biology today are either not essentialists at all, or if they are think there are essences they are relational, historical properties. In his provocative book Biological Essentialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Devitt argues for a new form o...
Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFor better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory....
Jan Westerhoff, "Candrakirti's Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesA proponent of the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Candrakīrti wrote several works, one of which, the Madhamakāvatāra, strongly influenced later Tibetan understandings of Madhyamaka. This work is the subject of Jan Westerhoff’s Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2024), part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. His book situates Candarkīrti and his text within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and helps philosophical readers appreciate t...
Krista K. Thomason, "Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesHow could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Krista Thomason flips the script on popular ways of dealing with our emotions, including neo-Stoicism, mindfulness, and even the prosperity gospel. She makes the case that we should get rid of the double standard we have towards "good" and "bad" emotions, and that we should not aim to be emotional saints. Instead, because "bad" emotions are an esse...
Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin, "Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn addition to denying the existence of a substantial, enduring self, Buddhists are usually understood to deny the existence of a God or gods. However, in Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin argue that there is conceptual space to affirm both basic Buddhist metaphysical claims and Classical Theism without contradiction. Their book argues that three fundamental commitments are generally agreed upon ...
Philip Goff, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDoes the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff argues for cosmic purposivism, the idea that the universe does have a purpose – although this is not because there is an all-powerful God who provides it with one. Instead, Goff argues, fundamental physics provides us with reason to think it is probable there is a cosmic purpose – and, moreover, th...
Fabrizio Cariani, "The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
November 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat does “will” mean? A standard view is that it is a tensed mirror-image of “was”, and that the truth-conditions of past and future sentences – “He was late to the event”, “He will be late to the event” – are symmetric. In The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk (Cambridge UP, 2021), Fabrizio Cariani argues against this tense-based view in favor of an asymmetric semantics in which “will” has more in common with “would” and other modal terms, and in which future-direct...
Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFrederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is its internal tension. Douglass begins by sincerely praising the founders and their philosophical principles, and then turns to a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of the United States. Underlying Douglass’s argument is a commitment to the democratic project in the United States that one imagines could be sustained only with extraordinary effort. Wha...
Chris Fraser, "Late Classical Chinese Thought" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourLate Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Chris Fraser's topically organized study of the Warring States period of Chinese philosophy, the third century BCE. In addition to well-known texts like the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mencius, Fraser's book introduces readers to Lu's Annals, the Guanzi, the Hanfeizi, the Shangjun Shu, and excerpts from the Mawangdui silk manuscripts. Beginning with a chapter on "The Way," or the dao, Late Classical Chinese Thought explores topics in ...
Emily McTernan, "On Taking Offence" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA lot of work in moral, political, and legal theory aims to define the offensive. Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the affectively intoned practice of taking offense. One consequence of this inattention is that discussion of offense-taking usually occurs within the context of popular culture critique, where many commentators lament that people today are too easily offended or take offence at too many things. The prevailing thought is that taking offence is usually mo...
Matthew R. Dasti, "Vatsyayana's Commentary on the Nyaya-Sutra: A Guide" (Oxford UP, 2023)
September 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Vatsyayana's Commentary on the Nyaya-Sutra: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2023), Matthew Dasti unpacks a canonical classical Indian text, the Nyayabhasya, while simultaneously demonstrating its relevance to contemporary philosophy. The commentary, the earliest extant on the Nyayasutra, ranges over topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, dialectics, and value theory. Dasti's guide includes his own translations of selections of the text and engagement with select int...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Adam Toon, "Mind As Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFolk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – for example, saying that John thinks the plant needs water as an inner mental state that explains why he is looking for the watering can. In Mind As Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford UP, 2023), Adam Toon argues that this view is incorrect: we do not have mental representations. Instead, while our concept of mind is of an inner wo...
Berislav Marusić, "On the Temporality of Emotions: An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhen someone close to us dies, intense grief is an expected and reasonable response. But while the reason for our grief – the loss of the person who is the object of our grief – doesn’t change, our grief itself diminishes. This diminishment is also expected, but how can it be reasonable if the reason for the grief hasn’t changed? In On the Temporality of Emotions: An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love (Oxford UP, 2022), Berislav Marusic articulates this puzzle of accommodation as a general feat...
Chrisoula Andreou, "Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIt is common to think that rational agency involves acting in ways that, given one’s options, maximize the satisfaction of one’s preferences. This intuitive understanding has generated a wide-ranging literature about the ways in which individuals routinely fail to be rational in the proposed sense: they make choices that not only do not maximize their preference satisfaction, but actually undermine or defeat their aims. Maybe we’re not rational animals after all? In Choosing Well: The Good, T...
Torin Alter, "The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFrank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know about the physical world while living in a completely black and white environment. Yet she seems to learn something new when she leaves the room for the first time and sees and smells a red rose. So is physicalism – the claim that everything, including conscious experience, is physical – false? In The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge A...
Kevin J. Elliott, "Democracy for Busy People" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourJohn Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task ...
Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, "Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
June 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new contribution to the Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair introduces readers to a tradition often ignored by contemporary philosophers. While simultaneously arguing for the fecundity of Sikh categories and concepts from a philosophical vantage point, Mandair scrutinizes the characterization of Sikh ideas as unified -ism, also problematizing the philosophy/religi...
Michael B. Gill, "A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art" (Princeton UP, 2022)
June 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art (Princeton University Press, 2022), Michael Gill shows how Shaftesbury’s efforts to work on himself resulted in his becoming one of the first philosophers writing in English to develop an aesthetic theory. Shaftesbury conceived of beauty as order or harmony exemplified by wild nature ju...
Hasok Chang, "Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022)
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic because we have no way of judging whether we are getting at that truth. In his new book, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022), Chang argues that we should understand scientific inquiry and its epistemic fruits in terms of what we do to acquire, justify, and use scientific knowledge. Drawing on Dewe...
Darrel Moellendorf, "Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that exacerbate existing global inequalities. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, even if adhered to, may not be sufficient. The situation seems hopeless. However, in Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (Oxford UP, 2022), Darrel Moellendorf argues that there not only is reason to hope that we might su...
Eberhard Guhe, "An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning: The Doctrine of Upādhi in the Upādhidarpaṇa" (Harvard UP, 2022)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAn Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning: The Doctrine of upādhi in the Upādhidarpaṇa (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation of this anonymous Navya-Nyāya treatise predating Gaṅgeśa. Eberhard Guhe’s book includes a translation as well as an introduction to the important idea of upādhi, which vitiates inferential reasoning. (Suppose smoke accompanies fire only when the fuel being burnt is wet. This fact would be an upādhi for the inference “There is smoke on the mountain bec...
Tiger C. Roholt, "Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesSocial scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving or medical procedures. In Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tiger Roholt discusses a distinct type of distraction: when smartphone use interferes with our active engagement with meaningful experiences, such as dinner with friends or a musical performance or gardening. In these cases, Roholt argues, we risk ...
Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization. Moreover, the Internet gives rise to new ethical and epistemological problems – fake news, sock-puppetry, internet hoaxes, disinformation, and so on. In Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Inte...
Matthew Ratcliffe, "Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience" (MIT Press, 2022)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe grief we feel when someone close to us dies is characterized by a complex and profound experience of loss. But what is this experience? In Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022), Matthew Ratcliffe articulates a common structure to grief experiences even while emphasizing that each person’s experience is highly individual. In his account, we live in experiential worlds structured by valued possibilities and anticipations that are integral to our identities as perso...
Thomas Kelly, "Bias: A Philosophical Study" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it is deployed frequently and in different contexts. For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions, and biased people. But we also talk about bias as a feature of certain frames of mind, habits, dispositions, and mental processes. In most of these contexts, bias is seen as a kind of failing or a bad-making feature. Attributions of bias are hence often accusatory, or at least a matter of negativ...
Monima Chadha, "Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBuddhists are famous for their thesis that selves do not exist. But if they are right, what would that thesis mean for our apparent sense of self and for ordinary practices involving selves—or at least persons? In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha answers these questions by considering Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selve...
Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesIt seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting, philosophically, about the unsayable? And if if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to (if not say something about) it? In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues...
Derrick Darby, "A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of rationale is increasingly vulnerable in a country that’s largely convinced that it has achieved a ...
Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
January 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Hil Malatino theorizes the centrality of bad feelings in a world of quotidian and spectacular anti-trans misrecognition, hostility, and violence. He does so not only to understand how bad feelings arise and how they can be hard to survive, but also what they can make poss...
Oana Serban, "After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions" (de Gruyter, 2022)
January 12, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also considered later on how his framework might apply to art. In After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (De Gruyter, 2022), Oana Serban elaborates on the suggestions and proposals of Kuhn and others to develop a new view of aesthetic and artistic progress and ...
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 30, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBy any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms? In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the argume...
Nancy J. Nersessian, "Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science" (MIT Press, 2022)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBased on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists do when they don’t yet have the models or the theories? In Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science (MIT Press, 2022), Nancy Nersessian reveals the bootstrapping creation of models in two biomedical engineering and two integrated system biology labs....
Alexander Kirshner, "Legitimate Opposition" (Yale UP, 2022)
December 01, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent contest for power. Typically, the value of legitimate opposition is understood in terms of democracy. Here, the idea is that democracy is damaged or subverted when practices of legitimate opposition are suppressed. However, this familiar account opens questions about the value of legitimat...
Charles Goodman, "The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters" (Oxford UP, 2022)
November 21, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has selected sections of this Sanskrit text which cover debates over the existence of prime matter, God, and an immaterial soul, as well as controversies around the cause and effect, karma, and Jain perspectivalism. Within these chapters, through a translation of the verses of t...
Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, "Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity" (Routledge, 2022)
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to be true are also necessarily true – true not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity (Routledge, 2022), Tristan Grotvedt Haze revisits the concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a m...
Saba Bazargan-Forward, "Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2022)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWe often find ourselves acting in concert with others, where what we do together goes beyond the causal contribution of any single participant. When a collection of individuals works together in a way that results in a wrongful harm, it’s intuitive to think that each of the participants should be held accountable. Yet this intuition needs to be squared with the fact that no single individual’s contribution was causally necessary for the wrongful harm to have occurred. Hence there’s a range of...
Leah Kalmanson, "Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesDoes human existence have a meaning? If so, is that meaning found in the world outside of us, or is it something we bring to our experience? In Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (Bloomsbury, 2020) Leah Kalmanson shows how East Asian philosophies challenge the dichotomy implicit in the way this question is often framed. Her book investigates Korean Buddhist meditation, Confucian ritual practices, and Yijing divination. Along the way she argues t...