New Books in Philosophy

By New Books NetworkSociety & Culture Philosophy

New Books in Philosophy episodes

October 15, 2015 Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015)
How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighed against the clinician’s hard-won judgment from treating hundreds of patients? These are some of the questions that are considered by Miriam Solomon in Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2015). Solomon, who is professor of philosophy at Temple University, provides an historically grounded critical assessment of the methods used in recent decades to turn basic science results into medical knowledge: consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine.
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1 hr 3 min
October 01, 2015 Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015)
There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage? But there are philosophical questions as well. What is the purpose of marriage? What are the goods that marriage helps individuals realize? Once marriage is no longer understood to be restricted to heterosexual couples, must we then question whether it should be restricted to couples? Why not recognize plural marital arrangements? Why should there be a civil institution of marriage at all?
In Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015), Stephen Macedo explores a range of philosophical, moral, and legal issues pertaining to marriage. He argues that, as a matter of justice, marriage rights must be extended to same-sex couples. But he also argues that marriage as an institution should be restricted to monogamous couples. Along the way, Macedo engages with opponents across the political spectrum, from Natural Law theorists who contend that marriage is intrinsically a heterosexual relation to contemporary feminist philosophers who argue for expanding marriage to encompass plural networks of care.
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1 hr 6 min
September 15, 2015 M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015)
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.
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1 hr 5 min
September 15, 2015 M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT, 2015)
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.
1 hr 5 min
September 01, 2015 Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015)
The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty.
In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.
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59 min
August 14, 2015 Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015)
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on historical and contemporary figures and continental and analytical traditions, he defends an embodied view of ostension in which we directly perceive intentions in ostension rather than infer to them, and gives an account of how we are able to disambiguate gestures through the joint presence of objects in a shared environment.
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1 hr 1 min
August 01, 2015 Max Deutsch, “The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method” (MIT, 2015)
There is a movement in contemporary philosophy known as “experimental philosophy” or “x-phi” for short. It proceeds against the backdrop of a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy. According to the Xi-phi critique, analytic philosophers rely too heavily on an unsound method which involves arguing for philosophical conclusions from premises whose force rests solely in what philosophers find “intuitive” or “obvious.” Using polling and survey methods, experimental philosophers show that claims that philosophers often take to be “intuitive” are in fact not commonly held among non-philosophers, and that individuals’ sense of what’s “obvious” varies according to factors such as ethnicity, geography, age, and gender. In light of this, X-philes claim that analytic philosophy is doomed, for it treats philosophers’ intuitions as evidence in favor of philosophical claims. But the variability of intuitions shows that intuitions have no evidentiary weight.
In The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method (MIT, 2015), Max Deutsch defends analytic philosophy against the x-phi critique by showing that, in fact, analytic philosophers do not treat intuitions as evidence. Drawing on careful readings of the texts that are the central targets of the x-phi critique, Deutsch shows that analytic philosophers rarely appeal to intuitions as if they provided evidential support.
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1 hr 18 min
July 15, 2015 Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathematical formalisms and computer simulations yield empirical knowledge? If so, when, and how? In Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics and Simulations (Oxford University Press, 2015), Margaret Morrison, Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, considers the epistemological status of the results of modeling and simulation as compared, and typically contrasted with, the results of experiment. She argues that no sharp distinction between simulating the world and measuring the world can be drawn in modern science, and that there is no justification for epistemically privileging the results of experiments over the new knowledge we derive from idealizations, abstractions, and fictional models.
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1 hr 7 min
July 01, 2015 Kevin Vallier, “Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation” (Routledge, 2014)
In a liberal democracy, citizens share political power as equals. This means that they must decide laws and policies collectively. Yet they disagree about fundamental questions regarding the value, purpose, and meaning of life. What role should their convictions concerning these matters play in their public activity as citizens? According to familiar answers, citizens must bracket or constrain the role that their religious convictions plays in their public lives. But many religious citizens find this unacceptable. Some of these hold that their religious views should determine law and policy. But that, too, looks unacceptable.
In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge, 2014), Kevin Vallier develops a novel view of the role of religious conviction and reasoning in liberal democracy. On his view, religious citizens will rarely need to constrain the role that their religious convictions play in their public activities. However, Vallier also contends that public officials and institutions cannot determine public policy solely on the basis of religious reasons.
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1 hr 10 min
June 15, 2015 Helen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural History of Natural Theology” (MIT Press, 2015)
In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also consider whether theism provides a good reason for the pervasiveness of religious belief across human societies across time, and argue that the seemingly obvious conclusion that a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs debunks these beliefs is not at all obvious.
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1 hr 2 min

About New Books in Philosophy

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.