New Books in Philosophy

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 contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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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 callosum has been surgically cut to alleviate epilepsy. This and other similar operations or conditions yield an odd phenomenon in which the patient appears to be two agents: for example, in controlled experiments they may only be conscious of stimuli shown to just their right eye, but when asked to draw the stimulus with the left hand they draw the stimulus shown to just their left eye. It is as if each hemisphere is its own self, with its own eye. In Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I (Oxford University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Schechter argues that while split brain subjects have two minds and two subjective perspectives, and are two intentional agents, they nevertheless constitute one person. Schechter, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, offers an in-depth exploration of the neuroscience and psychology of split brains and their implications for our understanding of minds, selves, agents and persons.

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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 languages we speak, the customs we practice, as well as our tastes and ambitions, all seem to depend largely on luck. In many cases, this is also true of our religious convictions. Hence a puzzle: it is common for religious convictions strike us as deeply personal and formative, and those who have them also see their religious beliefs as true, while regarding the religious beliefs of others as false, and perhaps worse. And yet once it is conceded that a person’s religious conviction is largely a product of circumstance, this common way of understanding religious conviction from the inside as it were begins to look strange.

In Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement (Lexington, 2019), Guy Axtell explores the implications of the realization that luck is an inexorable feature of our doxastic lives. He argues that a proper understanding of the impact of luck on our conviction can help us to navigate religious disagreement.

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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 knowledge. The existence of skepticism in Indian Philosophy, however, has long been neglected in favor of dogmatic positions. In Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa (Lexington Books, 2018), Ethan Mills considers the thought of three very different philosophers in classical India, representative of Buddhism, Carvaka materialism, and Advaita Vedanta respectively, who can be considered skeptics about philosophy. Each of the three presents his skepticism in sometimes puzzling ways, which is often necessary, given the nature of skeptical claims (or rather, lack of claims). The three philosophers discussed in this book are not universally accepted as skeptics by scholars of Indian Philosophy, but Mills makes a compelling case for understanding them as adopting skeptical positions, and argues that they can be taken to represent a distinct skeptical tradition in classical India.

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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, from bacteria and social insects to wolves, whales, and of course humans. What makes self-sacrifice to any degree even possible, given that self-interested behavior is the default? In The Philosophy of Social Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jonathan Birch critically examines the conceptual foundations of social evolution theory, considering debates about kin vs. group selection, cultural as well as genetic transmissible bases of inheritance, and inclusive vs. neighbor-modulated fitness. Birch, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, also discusses the view of multicellular organisms as societies of cells, and extends the concept of genetic relatedness to cultural relatedness by means of common cultural traits.

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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 renovation and expansion.  To take a simplistic example, the advent of the Internet has occasioned a host of new moral concepts attuned to the new ways in which people are able to treat each other --  think of “friending,” “blocking,” trolling, “sub-tweeting,” doxing, and such.  These are new concepts introduced into the moral vernacular for the sake of identifying novel kinds of moral behavior.  That our moral vernacular expands in these ways is obvious enough.  But there’s a distinct question concerning how more innovations become authoritative – that is, how new moral concepts come to bind us in that distinctive way that morality is binding.

In Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2018), Henry S. Richardson develops a fascinating account of how new, authoritative moral norms can be introduced. The book treats core topics in metaethics, moral psychology, and the theory of practical reasoning.

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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 or feature, how much, and they interact are still matters of dispute. In What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept(MIT Press, 2018), Maria Kronfeldner critically examines instead the 'nature' side of this dichotomy: what exactly is a human "nature"? Is it some kind of fixed human essence, a statistical norm, a normative ideal of how a human being ought to be? Kronfeldner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, argues against an essentialist view of nature, and replaces it with three concepts – descriptive, classificatory, and explanatory natures – that can do the various jobs that we want a "nature" concept to do without contributing to dehumanization, as the essentialist concept frequently has.

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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 data, what criteria do scientists use to choose between them? And given that even very popular scientific theories can turn out to be wrong, how are the criteria for theory choice related to truth? Do scientists even aim at true theories, as realists hold, or, as anti-realists hold, do they just care that the theories can explain what's observed? In Theoretical Virtues in Science: Uncovering Reality Through Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Samuel Schindler lays out an extended case for realism based on a close critical look at the main virtues that scientific theories are thought to aim for besides empirical adequacy, such as simplicity, explanatory scope, and fruitfulness. On Schindler's view, the extra-empirical virtues are also epistemic: for example, a simpler theory is also more likely to be true, and so scientists are epistemically justified in choosing a simpler theory over an empirically adequate but more complicated rival. Schindler, who is associate professor at the Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark provides an excellent discussion of the theoretical virtues themselves, their roles in actual theory choices, and their roles in realist-anti-realist debates about the nature of scientific theories.

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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 variety of cat food, and maybe your houseplants enjoy a certain corner of the room they’re in.  In many cases, these attributions pass by without much notice.  However, in certain regimented scientific contexts, the attribution of psychological states and capacities to non-human things has become indispensable in our best models of their behavior.  For examples, complex explanatory accounts of fruit flies and certain plants involve claims about them making decisions.  And our best science has it that neurons anticipate certain stimuli.  What are we to make of these attributions?

In Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates (Oxford University Press, 2018), Carrie Figdor defends Literalism, the view that in regimented scientific contexts, the attribution of psychological states and capacities to nonhuman and sub-personal systems should be taken literally.

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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–have provided focused accounts of mindreading, the more specific practice of ascribing beliefs, desires, and intentions to others in order to predict and explain their behavior. In How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition (Routledge, 2018), Shannon Spaulding draws on social psychological research and kindred spirits in philosophy to argue for an expansion of this traditional focus. In her Model Theory, mindreading includes other methods we use to understand others, such as stereotypes and scripts, and other goals of these practices, such as strengthening our in-group social relationships. Spaulding, who is assistant professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University, also explores some of the implications of her view for understanding issues in epistemology and ethics, in particular epistemic injustice.

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