New Books in Philosophy

By New Books NetworkSociety & Culture Philosophy

New Books in Philosophy episodes

February 15, 2014 Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period.
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1 hr 15 min
February 01, 2014 Joseph Carens, “The Ethics of Immigration” (Oxford UP, 2013)
It is commonly assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who must leave. But even supposing that there is such a right, we may ask the decidedly moral question about how it may be exercised. And this query calls us to try to bring our views about the ethics of immigration into equilibrium with our other moral convictions about citizenship, liberty, and equality. Can our common views and practices concerning immigration be rendered consistent with these deeper commitments?
In The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), Joseph Carens argues that our common commitment to democratic principles requires us to revise much of our thinking about immigration. Beginning with the uncontroversial practice of granting citizenship immediately to those born within a country’s territory, Carens argues that claims to social membership and thus to citizenship strengthen as individuals stay in a state; consequently, there is a point at which not extending citizenship to those living within a state’s borders is grossly immoral, even for those who have settled without the state’s permission. Carens’ arguments about the moral constraints on the state’s rights to exclude eventuate in an argument in favor of open borders.
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57 min
January 15, 2014 Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013)
In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and observed the result. The model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be: it would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Weisberg examines the nature, development and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at concrete models (such as the Bay Area model), computational models and mathematical models to argue for a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures, and their relation to the part of the world they model is in terms of weighted feature-mapping. His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science.
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1 hr 26 min
January 01, 2014 Michael Huemer, “The Problem of Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
The philosopher Robert Nozick once claimed that the most basic question of Political Philosophy is “Why not Anarchy?” Political philosophers pose this question often with the intent of demonstrating that there is indeed a good philosophical reason why governments should exist. Indeed, we often simply take for granted that the state and its vast coercive apparatus is morally justified. Similarly, we tend to think that anarchy is both a practically untenable and morally undesirable mode of social association. But governments claim not only power but authority over their citizens. And a few moments of reflection on the idea of authority suffices to see how curious an idea it is. To have authority is to have a right to create moral obligations in others simply by issuing commands, and a corresponding right to coerce compliance when others fail to obey one’s commands. It seems a puzzling phenomenon: The government claim to be able to make it the case that you’re morally required to do something simply in virtue of the fact that it has told you to do it. And they claim the moral right to imprison you for failing to do what they say.
In The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey(Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Michael Huemer explores this puzzling phenomenon, and defends the conclusion that in fact there is no such thing as political authority.
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1 hr 5 min
December 15, 2013 Jennifer A. McMahon, “Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy” (Routledge, 2013)
Art and ethics are linked philosophically by the fact that they are both fall under value theory; and some aestheticians, notably Berys Gaut, have argued for a direct connection between aesthetic and moral values, in that the moral values that an artwork may embody can raise or lower its aesthetic value. In Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2013), Jennifer A. McMahon argues that aesthetic and moral judgments are intrinsically linked by the fact that they contain a common element of community-calibrated subjective responses, and that as a result by reflecting on art we also exercise this element of moral judgment. McMahon, who is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, draws on Kant, pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, contemporary philosophers of mind such as Susanna Siegel, and interviews with contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson and Doris Salcedo, to argue for and illustrate her view.
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1 hr 6 min
December 01, 2013 R. Jay Wallace, “The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret” (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Our moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past. But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm. That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our present would not be. How is this mixture of regret and affirmation to be understood?
In his new book, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford University Press, 2013), R. Jay Wallace explores the complicated dynamic surrounding regret and affirmation. He develops a view that reconciles the apparent contradiction between regretting something that was a necessary antecedent to some attachment that one must now affirm. But in laying out this reconciliation, Wallace uncovers a pervasive and disconcerting truth about the human condition, namely that we must affirm aspects of our lives that are undeniably the products of highly objectionable features of the past.
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1 hr 1 min
November 15, 2013 Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Muhammad Ali Khalidi, associate professor of philosophy at York University, argues for what he calls an “epistemic” view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues. On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially-constructed.
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1 hr 5 min
November 01, 2013 Helene Landemore, “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton UP, 2012)
We’re all familiar with the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a formidable anti-democratic argument: Only truth or wisdom confer authority, and since democracy is the rule of the unwise, it has no authority. This rough line of argument has proven so formidable, in fact, that many democratic theorists have tried to evade it by explicitly denying that politics has anything to do with wisdom. But another strand of democratic theory takes the argument by the horns and tries to show that democracy is indeed epistemically sound. Some of these views try to show that democracy, warts and all, is yet wiser than the alternatives. But others have proposed a more ambitious reply according to which democracy has a positive epistemic value.
In her new book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), Helene Landemore pursues this more ambitious path. She argues that empirical data pertaining to the epistemic significance of cognitive diversity shows that democracy is uniquely placed to supply distinctive epistemic goods. Along the way, she explores a range of current findings regarding the “wisdom of crowds” and also engages core issues at the heart of normative political theory.
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53 min
October 15, 2013 Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013)
Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls “mindshaping”. Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural learners, and to conform to and enforce social norms, and in Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (MIT Press, 2013), Zawidzki defends the idea that mind-shaping is the basic capacity from which the rest of social cognition evolves. Most researchers hold that mind-reading – our “theory of mind” – is the linch-pin of the rest: our ability to ascribe to one another mental states with propositional content is necessary for sophisticated language use and for mindshaping. Zawidzki argues, in contrast, that our ability to “homogenize” our minds via mindshaping is what makes sophisticated mind-reading and language possible. On his view, language didn’t evolve so that we could express thought; it evolved so that we could express our commitment to cooperative behavior. Zawidzki’s innovative approach centers on reinterpreting and extending Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance to explain the social-cognitive development of the species and of individuals.
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1 hr 7 min
October 01, 2013 Simon Keller, “Partiality” (Princeton UP, 2013)
Our moral lives are shaped by a deep commitment to the moral equality of all persons. This thought drives us to think, for example, that each person’s life is of equal moral importance, that each person is deserving of equal regard, that no one’s life is intrinsically more morally important than any other, and so on. However, our lives are organized around what might be called special relationships – friendships, marriages, families, and such – and these relationships carry with them duties to show certain others special regard. Indeed, we would find fault with a father who did not show a certain degree of partiality for his own child. There seems to be a conflict. In order to manage it, we need a clear account of the moral nature of duties and reasons of partiality.
In his new book, Partiality (Princeton University Press, 2013), Simon Keller examines the leading accounts of partiality, and finds them lacking. He develops an original view of partiality according to which our reasons and duties of partiality arise from the relationships that we share with others which permit us to respond properly to the value of individuals.
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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.