New Books in Philosophy

By New Books NetworkSociety & Culture Philosophy

New Books in Philosophy episodes

September 14, 2013 Michael Marder, “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life” (Columbia UP, 2013)
“If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin”, a “zone of absolute obscurity” in which their mode of existence from a philosophical perspective is not even question-worthy. So writes Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in the Basque autonomous region of Spain, in his new book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). The metaphor of “ground-breaking” has never been so apt. Contrasting his view with the Aristotelean perspective in which plants are basically defective animals, Marder initiates inquiry into the nature of vegetal life on its own terms, and into how human life currently encounters, and how it should encounter, this radically foreign mode of existence. Marder’s goal is nothing less than a sort of Nietzschean “revaluation of values” when it comes to vegetal life.
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1 hr
September 01, 2013 Jody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013)
A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language. This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation, where we hear the sounds others make, and infer from those sounds the communicative intentions of speakers. On this view, communication is a highly deliberate affair, involving complex mediating processes of inference and interpersonal reasoning.
In his new book, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists (Oxford University Press 2013), Jody Azzouni accepts the idea that we must begin theorizing language from the perspective of language use. But nonetheless he rejects this common picture. In fact, Azzouni argues that the common view actually misconstrues our experience as communicators. On Azzouni’s alternative, we involuntarily perceive language items as public objects that have meaning properties independently of speaker intentions. Put differently, Azzouni argues that meaning is perceived, not inferred, much in the way we perceive the properties of physical objects. And yet he also argues that our perception of there being a common language– such as English– which supplies a common vehicle for communication is a kind of inescapable collective illusion. What’s more, Azzouni argues that the view that a common language is an illusion makes better sense of our experiences and practices with language.
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1 hr 7 min
August 15, 2013 Carlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012)
The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed language. In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2012), Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, focuses on the question: how do we represent time? That is, how is temporal information represented in biological creatures such as ourselves? Blending empirical research on biological timekeeping mechanisms and psychological measures of simultaneity judgments with philosophical accounts of mental representation and consciousness, Montemayor argues that traditional discussions of the “specious present” confuse two sorts of representations of the present. The empirical evidence points instead to a two-phase model: the sensorial present and the phenomenal present. The first is a non-conscious, multi-modal simultaneity window that is closely tied to our biological clocks and that informs our sensorimotor systems. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints.
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1 hr 9 min
August 01, 2013 Thom Brooks, “Punishment” (Routledge, 2012)
Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules. And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced. Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break the rules. Hence society features a broad system of institutions by which we punish. But there is a deep and longstanding philosophical disagreement over what, precisely, punishment is for. The standard views are easy to anticipate. Some say that we punish in order to give offenders what they deserve. Others claim that we punish in order to encourage others to obey the rules. Still others see punishment as a process of rehabilitating offenders. Recent theorists have attempted to combine these views in various ways. The debates go on.
In his new book, Punishment (Routledge, 2012), Thom Brooks reviews the leading debates concerning punishment and makes a compelling case for a distinctive theory of punishment called the “unified theory.” Brooks contends that the unified theory can embrace several highly intuitive penal goals while avoiding the philosophical difficulties confronting each of the competing theories.
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1 hr 24 min
July 15, 2013 Berit Brogaard, “Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief, desire and other propositional attitudes; they are what we agree and disagree about in conversation, and they are what is communicated in successful discourse. By philosophical tradition, propositions have their truth values eternally; that is, they always include a reference to a time as a component, and if true, they are always true. The proposition expressed in English by the sentence It is raining in Malta is more completely expressed by something like It is raining in Malta at noon local time on May 4, 2013. This standard view is called eternalism. In her new book Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard, associate professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, calls this traditional view into question. Brogaard defends temporalism, the claim that some propositions do not have their truth values eternally – they lack a time-stamp. She argues instead that eternalists cannot adequately explain how we retain beliefs over time, how we modify beliefs, and how we agree and disagree over the span of an ordinary conversation, and she presents a new argument for temporalism from the phenomenology of conscious mental states. Her lucid and comprehensive discussion is a milestone in debates about our experience of time as expressed in natural language.
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1 hr 1 min
July 01, 2013 Christopher Hookway, “The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.” According to this maxim, the meaning of a concept or a proposition is ultimately to be defined in terms of the “sensible” and “practical” effects it would produce in the course of experimental action. That is, of course, a crude articulation. But, according to Peirce, the view of meaning that the maxim articulates has vast philosophical implications. Peirce’s pragmatism is at once anti-skeptical, fallibilist, verificationist, inferentialist, and realist. Indeed, that looks like a motley crowd of philosophical commitments. How might they be made to hang together?
In his new book, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), Christopher Hookway explores the complexities of Peirce’s philosophy. With chapters devoted to topics ranging from Peirce’s fallibilism, his philosophy of language, his views on mathematics, his rejection of psychologism, and his theory of abduction, Hookway presents Peircean pragmatism as a formidable and strikingly contemporary philosophy. Hookway’s book will be of great interest to anyone interested in pragmatism and the history of 20th-century philosophy, but it also has much to offer to those working on current debates in fields like epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic.
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1 hr 5 min
June 15, 2013 Julia Tanney, “Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge” (Harvard UP, 2012)
It is fair to say that philosophy of mind and the sciences of the mind quite generally adhere to an information-processing model of cognition. A standard version holds that there are events going on in the brain that represent the world, and that familiar psychological terms are used to refer to these events. In Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2012), Julia Tanney, Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent, mounts a sustained attack on this dominant view. Taking her cue from Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tanney argues that reasons for action are not content-bearing mental states, and being rational is not learning certain rules. Instead, mental state ascriptions, in particular those of propositional attitudes, have the function of encapsulating or “marking” sense-making patterns of thoughts, actions, and sayings that are learned through acculturation. Understanding the mind starts from the perspective of reasons-explanations, which invoke these sense-making patterns: to ascribe a mental state to others and ourselves is to indicate a particular pattern, not refer to an event in the brain.
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1 hr 5 min
May 28, 2013 Kimberley Brownlee, “Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience” (Oxford UP, 2012)
When confronted with a law that they find morally unconscionable, citizens sometimes engage in civil disobedience – they publicly break the law with a view to communicating their judgment that it is unjust. Citizens in similar situations sometimes take a different stance – they engage in conscientious objection, they quietly disobey, seeking only to keep their own conscience clear.
A common view of these matters has it that the conscientious objector is deserving of special respect, and even accommodation, whereas the civil disobedient engages in a politically risky and morally questionable practice. In her new book, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012) Kimberley Brownlee reverses this picture. She contends that properly-conducted civil disobedience is more deserving of accommodation and respect than conscientious objection. Her case turns on a detailed and subtle analysis of the very concepts of conviction and conscience.
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1 hr 6 min
May 15, 2013 Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated.
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1 hr 3 min
May 01, 2013 Philip Pettit, “On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
In political philosophy, republicanism is the name of a distinctive framework for thinking about politics. At its core is a unique conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in non-domination, that is, in not having a master or lord, in not being subject to the arbitrary will of another. This republican conception of the free person contrasts with a competing and familiar view according to which freedom is primarily a property, not of persons, but of choices. On this view, one is free insofar as one enjoys the absence of interference.
For the past few decades, Philip Pettit has been engaged in a sustained effort to revive republicanism as an approach to political philosophy. In a series of articles and books, he has developed and defended the republican conception of freedom. In his latest book, On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Pettit articulates a conception of democracy to accompany the fundamental republican commitment to freedom as non-domination. The book examines the full range of topics, from justice to legitimacy and institutional design. This is a highly detailed and meticulously argued book.
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1 hr 12 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.