As we lose more individual animals and entire species to catastrophic climate change, habitat destruction, toxic dumping, and other human activities, it becomes increasingly difficult to register the full scope of the crisis. InAnimal Crisis: A New Critical Theory(Polity Press, 2022), Alice Crary and Lori Gruen reinvigorate the discourse of animal ethics with a critical theoretical approach that gives us new ways of thinking about what is owed to animals. By theorizing the links between human and non-human animal liberation, they offer ways of understanding why it can be so hard to see, hear, or feel the value and dignity of the animals right in front of us. Offering practices of interspecies solidarity, Crary and Gruen show us that we can transform the crisis we are in, but we must dismantle human supremacism to even connect with the need. Sarah Tysonis an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...
For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. InPerspectival Realism(Oxford University Press, 2022), Michela Massimi argues that to the contrary the plurality of perspectives is the driving force behind realism. On her view, the realism that emerges out of the perspectival nature of scientific representation takes perspectival models as inferential blueprints for exploring what is possible. The realist’s primitives are not essential properties, but the stable lawlike dependencies that are identified again and again from different perspectives. Massimi, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also shows how scientific communities develop “natural kinds with a human face”: evolving groupings of modally robust phenomena that result from historically and culturally situated systems of scientific practices. Massimi’s book constructs a new vision of realism in science t...
According to many standard philosophical accounts, beliefs are a kind of stance one takes toward a proposition. To believe that Nashville is in Tennessee is to adopt a certain attitude towards the proposition ‘Nashville is in Tennessee’. One advantage of this view is that it seems to make clear how beliefs can be right or wrong: to believe a proposition that is false is to have afalse belief, while to believe a proposition that is true is to have atrue belief. But in Philosophy things are never simple. And this kind of account occasions significant difficulties. Given how central the phenomenon of believing is to everything we do, it may seem odd to say that belief is a puzzle. Yet here we are. On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities(Oxford UP, 2022),David Hunterseeks to sort it all out. He presents a novel theory belief that stands in stark contrast with the standard view. On his view, “To believe something is to be in a position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Mark Siderits’How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics(Oxford University Press, 2022) is a wide-ranging survey of how Buddhist philosophers think about the nature of the world. The book takes readers through topics such as the well-known claim that there is no self, in addition to issues involved in causation, consciousness, and the metaphysics of time. Siderits argues that, as mereological nihilists, Buddhists deny the existence of conventional persons as well as the more ontologically robust self. He shows how their sparse ontology makes use of causation as the central explanation for the wholes that ordinary people mistakenly take to exist. Throughout the book, Siderits makes connections between seminal analytic thinkers like Russell and Frege as well as more contemporary work in metaphysics. Written for philosophically-trained readers, the book emphasizes reconstruction of the arguments for important Buddhist metaphysical ideas, grounded in references to particular texts, thinkers, and traditions. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy atYale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author ofLanguage, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy(Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcastSutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Art forms have rules, usually implicit, that govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have: for example, a representational painting should be hung right-side-up, the same sort of paint medium should be used in restoration, and the painting should not be touched. InImmaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art(Oxford University Press 2022), Sherri Irvin argues that contemporary conceptual art is constituted by custom rules as well as by their physical medium: the artist may specify that the work is intended to be handled, eaten, made out of anything, or even installed however the gallery or museum wants to. On Irvin’s view, such rules are essential for expressing a work’s meaning, even though they can also make that meaning difficult for audiences to grasp. In this illustrated volume, Irvin, who is research professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, considers a wide range of contemporary works to present, elaborate, and address challenges to her view. Carrie Figdoris professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Is a tree nothing but its material makeup, or does reality include trees above and beyond what they are made of? How about consciousness – nothing but neural activity, or something over and above it? Metaphysical emergence is a leading nonreductive theory of how we can be committed to a fully material world without accepting that everything reduces to fundamental physics. In Metaphysical Emergence (OUP 2021), Jessica Wilson synthesizes scholarship on the idea of emergence and divides the existing proposals into two basic schemas: Strong Emergence and Weak Emergence. Wilson, a professor of philosophy at University of Toronto and leading theorist of emergence, elaborates the differences between the forms and the main objections to each form. She also stakes out controversial positions regarding the existence of phenomena that satisfy each form: for example, on her view current evidence does not support the ideas that dynamically self-organizing complex systems or consciousness are Strongly emergent. Wilson’s book promises to be a landmark in the theoretical literature on emergence and its applications. Carrie Figdoris professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Everything is breaking down. Chaos is increasing. Entropy is not just a metaphor, although it also that. InEntropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation(Rowman and Littlefield, 2022),Shannon M. Mussett argues that while denial and nihilism are common and world-shaping responses to entropy, they are not our only options. By revaluing order and stability, chaos and decay, we can turn to entropy with care and see the possibilities for creation in destruction. Mussett makes these arguments attentive to suffering, loss, and oppression, offering a philosophy of thriving even as the whole universe inexorably moves towards heat death. Sarah Tysonis an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
According to a familiar picture, a democracy is a free society of self-governing equals. This means that democratic citizens have a duty to participate in the processes of democratic governance. Moreover, it is often held that their participation should be aimed atacknowledgingtheir fellow citizens’ status as democratic equals. On a dominant interpretation, this acknowledgement comes by way of how citizens conduct themselves in political decision-making contexts -- including especially contexts of political reasoning, disagreement, and debate. This raises the issue of thekindof reasons that one may bring to public political discourse. On a view associated with John Rawls, theorists of liberal democracy must distinguish between properlypublicreasons and reasons that are nonpublic. Of course, the distinction is fraught. In his new book,Public Reason and Political Autonomy: Realizing the Ideal of a Civic People(Routledge, 2022),Blain Neufelddefends a novel view of public reason in a democratic society. Robert Talisseis the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
What does a Bengali intellectual and poet have in common with a British-Austrian logician and philosopher? InLanguage, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore(Oxford University Press, 2021), Priyambada Sarkar explores the shared fascination both of these figures have with the limitations of language, the nature of the ineffable, and the role of poetry in our appreciatin both. While we know that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein read Tagore’s works to the Vienna Circle, Sarkar goes beyond this and other biographical anecdotes to demonstrate the depth of his interest in Tagore and the resonance between their approaches to language. She argues that while philosophers, according to early Wittgenstein, should maintain silence about certain domains, this does not extend to the poet or the artist, who is able to show, indirectly, what is beyond the threshold of language: the ethical, the religious, and the aesthetic. Tagore’s works themselves not only exemplify this capacity, but reflect on this possibility itself, and it is for this reason, Sarkar explains, that they are fruitfully read alongside of theTractatus. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy atYale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author ofLanguage, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy(Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcastSutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
“One should really only do philosophy as poetry.” What could Ludwig Wittgenstein have meant by this? What was the context for this odd remark? InWittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry(MIT Press, 2021), James Klagge provides a perspective on Wittgenstein as a person and how his life intersected with his work, in particular in the transition from his earlyTractatus Logico-Philosophicusto the laterPhilosophical Investigations. Based on private notebooks and memoirs by some of Wittgenstein’s students, Klagge, a professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, sees Wittgenstein’s interactions with his students as gradually prodding him to come grips with the problem of how to influence the frames of mind that people take to philosophical problems. Poetry, along with parables, similes, and other imaginative presentations, exemplify a way of addressing these non-cognitive attitudes – and Wittgenstein conceded that he was not entirely successful in his efforts. Carrie Figdoris professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy