New Books in Philosophy

By New Books NetworkSociety & Culture Philosophy

New Books in Philosophy episodes

January 01, 2015 Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking” (Oxford,
It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in some sense, have the authority to do so. It seems, then, that the power to perform acts by means of speech depends upon the normative status and standing of speakers.
In Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford University Press, 2014), Terence Cuneo appeals to this fact in devising an original and compelling argument for moral realism. He claims that were it not for the existence of moral facts, we would not be able to perform ordinary speech acts such as promising. As we clearly do perform such acts, there must be moral facts. That’s the simple argument that lies at the heart of Cuneo’s fascinating book.
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1 hr 4 min
December 15, 2014 Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joelle Proust considers the nature of metacognition from a naturalistic perspective, drawing on recent psychological research as well as a range of philosophical work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. In this erudite and comprehensive volume, Proust – a director of research at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris – defends an evaluative or procedural account of metacognition over a metarepresentational account. The former is the most general kind of metacognition, available to at least some non-human animals as well as humans, while the latter mind-reading view is a distinct, more sophisticated capacity that humans also possess. Proust also articulates an intriguing view of mental agency and the epistemic norms that govern mental action, and considers the implications of her positions for some cognitive disorders associated with schizophrenia.
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1 hr 2 min
December 01, 2014 Claudio Lopez-Guerra, “Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions” (Oxford UP, 2014)
Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible. For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised. We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is permissible. Indeed, these exclusion are often thought to be consistent with universal suffrage.
In Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford University Press, 2014), Claudio Lopez-Guerra challenges our common understanding of voting. Ultimately, he argues in favor of an elitist system of enfranchisement by lottery. He also criticizes arguments that universal suffrage is consistent with the exclusion of children, the mentally impaired, felons, and resident non-citizens. The result is a fascinating and provocative exploration of, and challenge to, the fundamental idea that voting is a basic right.
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1 hr 7 min
November 15, 2014 Eric Steinhart, “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” (Palgrave Macmillan)
What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life After Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Eric Steinhart presents core tenets of digitalism, a theology that transposes philosophical and theological concepts, principles, and arguments about the self, the universe and the nature of divinity into the conceptual framework of computer science. By defending the idea that everything is a computation, Steinhart, who is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University, defends a new way of thinking about the nature of life and the nature of death, and thus about the question of life after death. In his version of digitalism, there is no such thing as judgment in the Christian sense; your soul is simply a program that will rerun on a progression of superior computers.
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1 hr 7 min
November 01, 2014 Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together” (Oxford UP, 2014)
One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking down the street together. The former involves coordinated action and intention; but the latter involves something more–what we might think of as a shared intention. Once we recognize that shared activity involved share intentions, a range of distinctively philosophical questions emerge: What are shared intentions? What is their structure? How do they emerge? How are they connected to group action?
In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael E. Bratman addresses such questions. He argues that the planning theory of individual agency that he has developed in previous work provides sufficient resources for understanding small-scale instances of acting together. His claim, then, is that modestly social agency can be accounted for without the introduction of new philosophical elements such as “we intentions” and “joint commitment.” Bratman provides a model of group action and intention that is philosophically sparing but explanatorily powerful.
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1 hr 6 min
October 15, 2014 Stephen Yablo, “Aboutness” (Princeton UP, 2014 )
A day after Stephen Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained, “You never take me for ice cream any more.” Yablo initially responded that this was obviously false. But Yablo, who is professor of philosophy and linguistics at MIT, also noticed something interesting: that Zina said something true about their formerly regular activity of going for ice cream, and that she expressed this truth by saying something false. Wrapping truth in falsehood is common in ordinary conversation, but hard to reconcile with standard philosophical semantics, in which sentences only have truth conditions. In Aboutness (Princeton University Press, 2014), Yablo argues that sentences also have and are about subject matters, and that their subject matters are constrained but not determined by their truth conditions. To express and grasp truths, we often use language that goes beyond what we want to say and then subtract from the whole of what is said to expose the part we really care about: its subject matter.
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1 hr 8 min
October 01, 2014 Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise. And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern.
In Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Susan Haack brings her skill as an epistemologist to bear on a series of tangles concerning the legal concepts of proof, evidence, and reliability, especially as they apply in a series of notorious toxic tort cases. Along the way, she exposes several philosophical confusions in the law’s current understanding of the epistemological concepts it wields, and shows how her own distinctive epistemology–Foundherentism–can be useful to the law.
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1 hr 24 min
September 15, 2014 Richard Fumerton, “Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When she sees a red tomato for the first time, she learns something new: what it’s like to experience red. The Knowledge Argument has been a key move in philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the brain. In Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Richard Fumerton argues that the most motivated defense of the dualist position stems from a commitment to an internalist foundationalist epistemology – in much the way that Descartes argued for dualism centuries ago. Fumerton, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, weaves together discussion of core debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language to show how critical choices in these areas affect the force of the knowledge argument.
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1 hr 10 min
September 01, 2014 Samuel Scheffler, “Death and the Afterlife” (Oxford UP, 2013)
Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value. This much is commonplace. What is not frequently noticed is that our practices of valuing and finding meaning in our lives draw upon the presumption that others will outlive us, that there will be generations of human beings continuing into the future. One way to grasp the significance of this presumption is to imagine a scenario in which we know that humanity has no future. How would this knowledge affect our lives in the present? Would the pursuit of our goals matter? What do our likely reactions to the imagined scenario tell us about value? And what does the envisioned scenario tell us about how we should regard our own death?
In Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013), Samuel Scheffler carefully explores these questions. His surprising suggestion is that much of the value that we find in our own lives depends upon inevitability of our own death and the existence of others who will survive us.
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1 hr
August 15, 2014 Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Anne Jaap Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion of representation is actually used in cognitive neuroscience. On her view, mental items do not stand in intentional relations to the world, as standard theories of mental representation hold. Instead, they are samples or instances of the same kinds, as captured by common mathematical descriptions. This sampling model has its roots in Aristotle and Hume, but is found in contemporary neuroscience, such as when seeing a particular action causes the neural pattern for doing that action to be activated. In this interview, Jacobson explains and expands on her view, which she dubs Aristotelian representation.
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1 hr 5 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.