New Books in Philosophy

In Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Garfield argues that Buddhist ethics is a distinctive kind of moral phenomenology whose ethical focus is not primarily cultivation of virtues or the achievement of certain consequences. Rather, its goal is for moral agents to shift a non-egocentric attitude about the world from recognizing its interdependence, impermanence, and lack of any essential selves. He makes this argument through investigation into a number of Buddhist thinkers, attending to both pre-modern and modern texts whose genres range from narrative to the more straightforwardly philosophical. While Buddhist Ethics is written for philosophers trained in the broadly “Western” traditions, and therefore engages with ethical literature from Ancient Greece to early modern Europe to the present day, the work’s goal is primarily to show what is characteristic of Buddhist ethics as a historical and also living philosophical tradition.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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How do we reason about causal relationships, how do we determine what the causal relatiomships in nature are, and how are these two things – causal cognition and causation – connected? In Causation With a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2021), James Woodward synthesizes the normative and descriptive aspects of reasoning about causation in a way that combines a minimal realism about causal relations with the ways in which creatures like us think about and investigate these relations. While the descriptive (how we do reason) and the normative (how we ought to reason) are distinct, Woodward – Distingushed Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh – argues that normativity is built into our theories of causation, and armchair philosophical analysis, experimental philosophy, and cognitive psychology all provide different kinds of information about our causal reasoning and the worldly infrastructure that enables causal interventions based on that reasoning to be successful.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they’ll typically have to make a moral decision about whether the identity of the donor will be available to the resulting person. This quickly raises additional moral and even existential questions about the value of knowing about the circumstances of our own conception.

In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford UP, 2021) Daniel Groll argues that because donor-conceived persons are likely to develop a significant and worthwhile interest in knowing the identity of their genetic progenitor, their intended parents have an obligation to use a non-anonymous donor.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Probably the most well-known Chinese philosopher around the world is Kongzi, typically called by his Latinized name, “Confucius.” And yet he did not write a single book. Rather, his students collected Kongzi’s life and teachings into the Analects, a text which has become immensely influential from ancient Confucian traditions up to the current day. 

In The Analects: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2021), Erin M. Cline argues that we should understand the Analects not only as a guide for living, or a philosophical set of sayings on ethics, but as a sacred text. She argues that this approach helps us reflect more critically about the categories like the sacred, and to appreciate the role of Kongzi as a personal exemplar in the text. Engaging closely with the text of the Analects as well as traditional commentaries and contemporary scholarship, Cline introduces the reader to the history of this text as well its major themes, such as ritual, filial piety, and the relationship between the ordinary and the sacred. By situating the Analects alongside works such as the Nichomachean Ethics and the Bible, her work investigates the text from both philosophical and religious perspectives, while reflecting on these categories themselves.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Can the concept of the nation be a resource for liberatory political struggle? Are the dangers of nationalism simply too great? In Creolizing the Nation (Northwestern UP, 2020), Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization offers theoretical resources for imagining the possibilities of decolonial nations. Such new imaginings are made possible by the ways creolization allows us to think subjectivity, community, and history inventively. Sealey draws our focus to everyday practices of sabotage and jostling that deserve our attention. She creates conversations between the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega to theorize identity and community in terms of difference, flux, and ambiguity. Sealey gives us errant possibilities. Creolizing the Nation was just awarded the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver.

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We think of grief as a normal response to the death of a loved one. We’re familiar with the so-called “five stages” of grief. Grief seems as an emotional episode that befalls us along life’s way, something to be endured and then gotten over. But grief isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. For one thing, we can grieve for strangers. And although there seems to be something like a duty to grieve, it’s not clear to whom such a duty could be owed. Perhaps grief is indeed a psychologically normal response to death, but might it nonetheless be bad for us to grieve?

Despite such questions, there has been surprisingly little attention given to grief among philosophers. In Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press, 2021), Michael Cholbi bucks that trend. He offers a philosophical analysis of grief as a complex affective process that focuses attention on matters that can contribute to self-knowledge.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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We tend to think that states can act wrongfully, even criminally. Thus, we also tend to think that states can be held responsible for their acts. They can be made to pay compensation to their victims or suffer penalties with respect to their standing in the international community, and so on. The trouble, though, is that when states are held responsible, the cost of moral repair is transferred to the citizens of the offending state, including citizens who objected to the wrongful acts, may have been unaware of them, or were powerless to prevent them. What could justify this?

In Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for their State’s Wrongdoings? (Oxford University Press 2021), Avia Pasternak develops a new defense of the idea that citizens have a duty to share in the burdens of their state’s wrongdoing. However, Avia also addresses the practical moral complexities of state wrongdoing, and defends a context-sensitive framework for distributing the burden.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy by James Garrison (SUNY Press 2021), argues that the tradition of Confucian philosophy can provide resources for theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault in understanding what it is to be a subject in the social world. Garrison’s interlocutors are intercultural, from Confucius to Kant, Arendt to Butler, Hegel to Nietzsche. His book argues that Confucianism offers a relational, discursive, bodily, and ritualistic conception of the self. Through philosophers like Mencius, Xún Zǐ, and Lǐ Zéhòu, Confucianism’s emphasis on embodied aesthetic experiences presents new ways of thinking about how human beings can resist passivity in the face of society and instead learn how to consciously and bodily gain purposeful self-awareness.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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In their open-access publication, Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever argue that philosophers of language can contribute to a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence. AIs known as “neural nets” are becoming commonplace and we increasingly rely on their outputs for action-guidance, as when an AI like Siri hears your question and says, “There’s a pizza shop on the corner.” Our use of words like “says” suggests an important question: do AIs literally say anything? Should we understand their outputs as utterances with meaningful content? And if so, what makes that content meaningful, and how is it related to the processes which result in that output? Cappelen and Dever take up these questions and propose a framework for answering them, abstracting from existing externalist approaches to develop a “de-anthropocentrized” externalism for AI. The book introduces readers not only to issues in AI surrounding its content and interpretation, but also to concepts in philosophy of language which may be relevant to these issues, serving as an invitation for further investigation by philosophers and programmers alike.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Birds sing to set up a territory, but the relationships between the bird, the song, the territory, and the bird’s community are highly complex and individually variable. In Living as a Bird (English translation by Helen Morrison, Polity Press, 2021), Vinciane Despret explores the concept of territory from a perspective that situates philosophical work on human conceptions of other animals within historical and contemporary empirical research into bird song and territorial behavior. Following recent theorizing by ornithologists and ethologists, Despret – an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Liege in Belgium – critiques the popular view of territories as private property and birds as petit bourgeois who gain property rights, a conception grounded in European social upheavals starting in the 17th century. Instead, territories are zones of social interaction with one’s “dear enemies” at the peripheries, where male and female birds alike are active participants in the shaping, reshaping and sharing of neighborhoods bounded in song as well as space. This new translation makes Despret’s thoughtful analysis of songbird life accessible to an English-speaking audience.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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