New Books in Philosophy

New Books Network

Interview with Philosophers about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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Episodes

Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011)

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops i...

Nov 15, 2011•1 hr 7 min

Fabienne Peter, “Democratic Legitimacy” (Routledge, 2011)

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The quip reveals an interesting dimension of democracy: it’s hard to beat, but it’s also hard to love. Democracy is hard to love because it sometimes requires us to acquiesce and live by decisions, rules, and laws that we oppose. In fact, democracy sometimes requires us to accept political outcomes that we take to be demonstrably sub-optimal, mistaken, and even unjust. In short, when democracy decide...

Nov 04, 2011•55 min

Troy Jollimore, “Love’s Vision” (Princeton UP, 2011)

Love – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go ’round, and all you need is love. But what sort of experience is loving? What more can we say about it that will illuminate the kind of experience it is? In his thought-provoking new book, Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011), Troy Jollimore, Professor of Philosophy at California State Univ...

Oct 15, 2011•1 hr 6 min

Jason Brennan, “The Ethics of Voting” (Princeton UP, 2011)

It is commonly held that citizens in a democratic society have a civic duty to participate in the processes of collective self-government. Often, this duty is held to be satisfied by voting. In fact, the sentiment is commonly expressed that voting is always a good thing for citizens to do, no matter how they vote. Similarly, it is widely held that when citizens neglect to vote they violate a civic duty, no matter how uninformed or misguided their votes would have been. These popular pieties abou...

Sep 30, 2011•1 hr 14 min

Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics” (Oxford UP, 2011)

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not real...

Sep 14, 2011•1 hr 3 min

Elizabeth Anderson, “The Imperative of Integration” (Princeton UP, 2010)

Demographic data show that the United States is a heavily segregated society, especially when it comes to relations among African-Americans and whites. The de facto segregation that prevails in the US is easily shown to produce grave and systematic disadvantage for African-Americans. The degree and extent of this segregation is difficult to explain in the morally innocent terms of individual choice and personal responsibility. Furthermore, the disadvantages that result are not adequately address...

Sep 01, 2011•1 hr 2 min

Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011)

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to hav...

Aug 15, 2011•1 hr 7 min

Sanford Goldberg, “Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2010)

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access. What is the nature of this reliance? Do testifiers simply provide us with especially compelling evidence? Should we regard the testimony of others as only so much more local data in our cognitive environment? Or is there a deeper sense in which much of our knowledge depends on others? In his new book, Rely...

Aug 04, 2011•1 hr

Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis ...

Jul 15, 2011•1 hr 4 min

Gerald Gaus, “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bound World” (Cambridge UP, 2010)

If we are to have a society at all, it seems that we must recognize and abide by certain rules concerning our interactions with others. And in recognizing such rules, we must take ourselves to sometimes be authorized to hold others accountable to them. Perhaps it is also the case that we must recognize that states have the authority to enforce the rules. It has long been the aim of liberal democratic political theory to show that there is a form of social authority which is consistent with the i...

Jul 05, 2011•1 hr 4 min

Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience. We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round, and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant....

Jun 15, 2011•1 hr 3 min

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