New Books in Philosophy

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 in his thought. She shows that Kant employs teleology as a means to orient us within the chaotic contingency of experience in order to plan and navigate a path to just political orders from our current conditions. Teleology, far from functioning as a deterministic principle in Kant’s work, provides a way to think through issues such as the importance of our historical narratives, cultural differences, and geographic limitations for politics. Huseyinzadegan argues that Kant proposes cosmopolitanism as the proper path for politics, not because it is a political ideal, but because—given where we’ve been, what we’re capable of, and the conditions in which we act—cosmopolitanism offers the most promising means of achieving the ultimate aim of politics, which is peace. Further, Huseyinzadegan shows that understanding the relationship of nonideal to ideal theory in Kant’s work exposes how Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism operate in his political theory and how we can and must theorize differently.

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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 a function plays a central role in biology: biologists frequently refer to the functions of many traits of evolved organisms. But not everything a trait causes is its function – the stripes might disorient some harmless birds, but that isn’t their function. So what determines the function of a trait? And what sort of explanations are offered when biologists claim that a trait has a particular function? In What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Justin Garson defends his generalized selected effects theory of what functions are and what they do. Garson, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY, argues that functions can result from differential retention as well as differential replication in a population, and that to refer to a trait’s function is to provide a condensed causal explanation. This accessible introduction to debates regarding functions in the philosophy of biology also considers how the generalized selected effects theory contributes to contemporary debates in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of mind.

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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 surrounding world—we must also know that we perceive together.  In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge.  Philosophical questions mount quickly: How is this kind of knowledge possible?  How does it arise?  What does its possibility show us about our sociality?  What does it suggest about the world around us?

In The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space (MIT Press, 2019), Axel Seemann develops an account perceptual common knowledge that is both philosophically subtle and empirically informed.

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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 topics.  In his new book, Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Mukula's 'Fundamentals of the Communicative Function'(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Malcolm Keating looks at the views of the philosopher Mukula Bhatta, whose innovative position on meaning aimed to capture the differences between meaning in everyday speech and meaning in poetry. As Keating explains, Mukula “sets out a framework for how communication happens, from what words mean to how sentences are constructed to how people use language beyond its ordinary meanings” (p. 2). Keating offers a translation and interpretation of Mukula’s text, and also discusses numerous ways that Mukula’s thought (and classical Indian discussions of language in general) can be helpful for contemporary philosophers.

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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, and how did it come to be a science? In Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), Chiara Russo Krauss considers the conceptual foundations of psychology as a science in the conflicting views of Wilhelm Wundt and Richard Avenarius. Wundt established the first psychology lab but continued to see psychology as a science of self-observation, while the philosopher Avenarius embraced the emerging materialistic perspective in which the same physical methods that had just been successfully applied to explaining life could be used to explain conscious experience. Russo Krauss, a researcher at the University of Naples Federico II, makes clear the major role that Avenarius played in the shaping of psychology into the science that it is today.

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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 key question for our times how do we interact with each other, especially in politically contentious situations? Olberding addresses this and related issues by bringing our moderns challenges into dialogue with thinkers from early China. Weaving together modern cultural references with innovative readings of classic Chinese texts, Olberding makes the argument that acting with good manners and civility is the way we practice core human values in everyday life.

Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at [email protected].

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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, epistemic, metaphysical, and political issues surrounding sex and love pervade our culture.  Where would pop music, television, and fine art be without the dilemmas at the intersection of love and sex?  And yet there are some less familiar philosophical issues lurking as well.

In Philosophy of Sex and Love (Routledge, 2019), Patricia Marino not only introduces a wide range of philosophical issues pertaining to love and sex; she also develops original and compelling positions on the questions she explores.

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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, and the Character of Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018), John T. Lysaker explores the importance of the praxis of writing for philosophy. Essaying a variety of forms, the book invites the reader to investigate the volume in their hands as a performance. It engages with, among others, the work of Plato, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Cavell, not only to show how form matters for thought, but also how thought is always made possible by what has come before. The book argues for philosophy to reconsider academic articles as the dominant mode of writing in the profession and offers an example of the creative ways in which philosophy can unfold.

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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. This explanatory practice brings evolutionary biology into conceptual contact with rational choice theory, which provides models of how people make decisions and act on them. In Agents and Goals in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), Samir Okasha explores the fascinating and complex links between evolutionary biology and rational choice theory, arguing that “agential thinking” in adaptationist explanations of nonhuman organisms is justified by providing explanatory purchase that goes beyond using the concept of function. He also argues how natural selection does not necessarily or even probably lead to the most adapted (or fittest) traits, and considers how and when the idea of utility maximization in economics has its valid analogue in the idea of adaptive fitness.

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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 ways of thinking, inquiring, handling evidence, and managing information. We sometimes criticize others for being careless, dogmatic, gullible, and so on. These evaluations often have the form of appraisals of the persons to whom they are applied. So, just as we might speak of intellectual virtues, we can also speak of intellectual vices.

In Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019), Quassim Cassam develops a conception of epistemic vice, and explores the sites where specific vices of this kind appear. The result is a fascinating examination of the ways in which individuals’ flawed ways of thinking can impact the world.

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