New Books in Philosophy

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 evidence for our beliefs (such as the belief that there is a red rose in front of you)?

In The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018), Susanna Schellenberg considers these questions about the role of perception in mind and knowledge. Schellenberg, who is professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University, offers a unified account of perception as the capacity to discriminate and single out particulars, and defends the answers that “capacitism” provides to such questions as the relation between perception and consciousness and the way in which hallucinators and perceivers share some types of evidence for their beliefs but differ importantly in others.

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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 free will, as well as various attempts to render free will consistent with a physically deterministic world.  Among these latter, there’s a tendency to redefine free will in a way that dissolves the apparent tension between freedom and determinism.

In his new book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), Christian List defends a robust conception of free will according to which it requires intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control.  He argues that humans indeed have free will, and this free will is consistent with a naturalistic and scientific world view.

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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 race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention.  In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis.  While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices.  While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality.

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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 system to guide its behavior. Naturalistic theories of representation provide explanations of what information, or content, these internal states carry, and how they come to have the contents that they do. In Representation in Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018), Nicholas Shea approaches the problem from the perspective of the role that the contents of subpersonal states play in explanations of a system’s behavior. Shea, who is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London, offers a theory that integrates two main components – task functions and exploitable relations – into a pluralist view called Varitel Semantics. He presents and defends his account and considers how it fares in relation to competitor theories.

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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 position of authority can harm others simply by speaking – as when a boss announced and thereby institutes a discriminatory office policy. In such cases, the announcement is itself a harm in addition to the harm of the instituted policy – the boss’s announcement constitutes a harm and does not only cause harm. Once we’ve see the ways in which authoritative speech can constitute harm, we might look for mechanisms other than speaker authority by means of which speech can be constitutively harmful.

In her new book, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech can be harm. On her analysis, one needn’t be positioned in an authoritative role to speak in ways that constitute harm. Rather, everyday communicative acts can constitute – and not simply cause – harm.

Mary Kate is the Margaret Capp Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works primarily in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law.

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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, Anscombe contributed fundamental insights in philosophy of mind, action theory, and ethics. In his new book No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2018), James Doyle considers two of her major papers: in "Modern Moral Philosophy", she denies that the term "moral" picks out a special, sui generis type of obligation, reason, or motivation, and argues for reorienting ethics towards understanding concepts of virtue; while in "The First Person", she denies that the term "I" really is the device of self-reference that it seems to be. Doyle, who is lecturer in philosophy at Harvard University, clarifies her arguments and assesses them in response to a number of prominent critics. In doing so, he shows how Anscombe's work continues to inspire thinking about fundamental issues in ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

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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, borders, asylum, and refugees.  However, relatively little work has been done on questions concerning how refugees are treated once they have gained access to a new country; and from these questions emerge additional issues concerning the repatriation of refugees.  As it turns out, there are several global organizations involved in efforts to make repatriation accessible to refugees.  However, it is frequently the case that repatriation is dangerous and risky; and often the refugees’ desire to repatriate is arguably non-voluntary.  Distinctive moral concerns quickly into view.

In The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation (University of Edinburgh Press, 2018), Mollie Gerver systematically addresses these distinctive moral questions.  Combining philosophical analysis with testimonial data from extensive field work with refugees, she makes concrete policy recommendations for navigating this fraught moral landscape.

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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 further harm when individuals and institutions will not or cannot hear the survivors’ claims about what they suffered and what they are owed for having suffered. She calls this further harm “ethical loneliness.” With Stauffer’s analysis, the harm of ethical loneliness can lead us to rethink how we understand responsibility for harm, the work of repair, the role of retribution in repair, and how we are constituted as subjects such that we are capable of striving to undo unjust deeds, even mass atrocities. Focused on hearing and what practices of hearing justice demands, Stauffer looks to survivors’ stories to analyze how the harm of ethical loneliness can be inflicted, even by people with intentions to help and survivors. She then shows how revisionary and reparative work can be done to hear those stories with an ear to how the world may need to change in light of survivors’ claims.

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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 ways that we do? These are questions about human attitudes towards other animals, and the moral implications of those attitudes. In Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals (Oxford University Press, 2018), T. J. Kasperbauer examines this relatively underexplored area of moral psychology. Kasperbauer, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Bioethics and the Indiana University School of Medicine, argues that we dehumanize animals in a particular way to ensure their status as inferior outgroups, and that our ability to improve moral outcomes is limited by our psychology. But knowing what these psychological limits are is crucial for understanding how moral behavior towards animals can be improved.

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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.  Perhaps most notorious of these are the problems concerning skepticism.  It seems that any analysis of knowledge admits of cases where the analysis is satisfied and yet knowledge has not been secured.  This has led some philosophers to seek some other starting point for epistemology.  Perhaps one should begin with the anti-skeptical premise that there are clear cases of knowledge, and then attempt from there to provide analyses of its constituent elements – belief, justification, evidence, and so on.  Alas, this approach also has invited difficulties.

In What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2019), Michael Hannon takes a different approach.  He argues that the place to begin in epistemology is with the question of the function of knowledge.   Or, more precisely, he proposes to begin with an examination of the function of the concept of knowledge, the purpose for the sake of which we evaluate others as knowers.  The result is a “function-first” epistemology.

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