Claim OwnershipNew Books in Philosophy
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Interview with Philosophers about their New Books
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1It is not uncommon to encounter people who think and talk about the world so differently from the way you do that it’s not really possible to put yourself in their shoes. But such systems of representing the world are not truly alien – they still involve terms that pick out objects, properties, and other elements found in familiar languages and metaphysical theories.
In Alien Structure: Language and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2024)), Matti Eklund considers whether there are ways of representing the world that are completely alien in both linguistic and metaphysical structure, and which may capture reality better (on an ontological realist view) or which might show the limits to “anything goes” (on an ontological relativist view). Eklund, who is professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, defends the value of considering these possibilities and links his discussion to conceptual engineering, philosophy of quantum mechanics, and other contemporary philosophical debates.
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Does Marx have a coherent ethical vision? How does that square with his sometimes-scathing dismissal of morality? What does his critique of capital have to do with ethics? Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class? What is the normative importance of that claim?
In Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press, 2024), Vanessa Wills provides a careful reconstruction of Marx’s understanding of human nature and the possibility of creating a world best suited to our flourishing. Working from Marx’s earliest texts through his last, Wills shows not only how Marx builds his understanding from material conditions in their historical specificity, but also how doing so can help guide efforts to change the world in ways that support individual growth, self-expression, and development as a universally shared project. Wills consistently argues against philosophical projects that try to salvage Marx’s valuable insights stripped of his method. Wills shows that the method by which Marx sought to understand the world and human nature as a force within it is integral to understanding his vision for what ought to be.
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Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Land is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millenium (University of Chicago Press), Roberta Millstein aims to set the record straight. Millstein, who is professor emerit of philosophy at the University of California – Davis, offers interpretations of Leopold’s key concepts of the “land community” based in complex webs of causal interactions and “land health” as an ability of the land community to renew itself over time. She provides a comprehensive overview of Leopold’s prescient ideas regarding the expansion of humanity’s scope of moral concern to the land communities to which we belong.
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We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents.
Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And, moreover, the idea that modern elections reveal or express such a will remains dubious. Accordingly, a good deal of democratic theory aims to fill in the missing details regarding the collective will and its representation.
In The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford University Press 2024), Samuel Bagg takes a different tack by proposing a vision of democracy where the central aim is to protect public power from capture.
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The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil and afterlife, as well as religious identity, beliefs, practices, and diversity. Contributions vary in methodology; some focus on empirical data and modern culture, while others engage with philosophical texts. Essays focus on a range of religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous practices. Despite this variety, the volume's editors present the collection as having a kind of unity, both in the specificity of how Southeast Asia "appropriates" religions and the philosophical nature of the essays included.
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We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly, this is someone who has been selected by an official process to hold a political office where he or she is tasked with promoting, advocating, and speaking for a constituency. However, we are also familiar with informal representatives: those who speak for a constituency but are not appointed by formal processes. Once again, the idea of an informal political representative is probably familiar: rock stars and other celebrities commonly claim to “speak for” others with respect to distinctively political matters, and they are understood by the public to (informally) represent a constituency.
Of course, there are lots of ways in which informal political representation can go wrong. Surprisingly, the topic has not been thoroughly theorized. Until now. In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press 2024), Wendy Salkin develops an intricate framework for thinking about informal political representation.
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What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its considerations of this question, supporting domination and oppression.
In Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2022), Havis brings our focus to theoretically rich practices of African diasporic communities. Offering critical insight into how philosophy has been narrowed, Havis also offers a guide to interpreting the world otherwise, engaging stories, novels, the blues, jazz, work songs, naming and self-naming, and more. Havis does Black Vernacular Philosophy in conversation with other doers as she shows us the urgent need for such work.
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It was an astounding discovery in the early 1980's that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across the animal kingdom, whether the result was a flatworm, an octopus, a mouse, or a human. This discovery of the conservation of a key developmental mechanism across phyla and vast stretches of evolutionary time helped launch the interdisciplinary field of evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo-Devo.
In Evolution and Development: Conceptual issues (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Alan Love explains and explores Evo-Devo and the philosophical problems that arise in its pursuit. Love, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, considers such issues as the type of scientific unity that arises from focusing on problem agendas rather than theory, the problem of determining when variation in traits gives rise to a novel trait, and how the identity of features at various levels of biological organization can be explained by particular causal mechanisms.
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The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there’s plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy, there is also an increasing reliance on ideas like misinformation, bias, expertise, and propaganda. These latter notions belong, at least in part, to epistemology – the area of philosophy that deals with issues concerning knowledge, rationality, evidence, and belief. Relatively recently, the subfield of political epistemology has emerged. Political epistemologists explore philosophical issues of political belief, political expertise, political information and so on. But they also are concerned to examine the ways in which political arrangements can go well or badly, depending on the character of the epistemic practices that prevail in society.
Political epistemology is — by philosophy’s standards – a new subfield. Perhaps it is no more than two decades old. Yet the field is organized around a few disputes. In Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge 2024), Oliver Traldi surveys the terrain, often leading the reader to the conclusion that things are more complicated than they might seem.
This book is available open access here.
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An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings.
Stephen Harris’s Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is a study of the Guide. It articulates Śāntideva’s moral psychology and virtue theory in chapter-length treatments of four central virtues: generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom. According to Harris, Śāntideva thinks these virtues benefit human persons, and thus the radically altruistic bodhisattva path is also a self-interested one. Harris’s book also explores how this ethical project coheres with the emptiness of all things, the famous Madhyamaka denial of intrinsic nature.
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There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.
In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face.
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In political philosophy, “liberalism” is not the name of a particular social platform. Rather, it refers to a framework for thinking about politics. It is the way of thinking according to which the state, its laws, and its institutions all stand in need of justification, and that the justification of the state must be addressed to those who live within its territory. In this way, liberalism as a philosophical stance affirms the moral equality of persons and prioritizes the liberty of each, “taken one by one,” as it were. The idea of liberalism as a way of life thus may seem curious. According to many traditional liberal thinkers, liberalism is distinguished from other approaches by the denial that it is a “way of life.” On these views, a liberal political order establishes the conditions under which each individual can “seek their own good in their own way,” as John Stuart Mill put it.
In Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press 2024), Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism currently informs our cultural sensibilities. What’s more, he argues that liberalism is a worthwhile way of life.
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Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together?
In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism.
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Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp contrast, today's artificial neural networks – deep learning – are able to learn from experience, and perform at human-like levels of perceptual categorization, language production, and other cognitive abilities at h. This difference has been portrayed as roughly parallel to the philosophical divide between rationalists or nativists on the one hand, and empiricists on the other.
In From Deep Learning to Rational Machines (Oxford UP, 2024), Cameron Buckner lays out a program for future AI development based on discussions of the human mind by such figures as David Hume, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Sophie de Grouchy, among others. Buckner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, offers a conceptual framework that occupies a middle ground between the extremes of 'blank slate' empiricism and innate domain specific faculty psychology, and defends the claim that neural network modelers have found, at least in some cases, a sweet spot of abstraction from the messy details of biological cognition so as to capture the relevant similarities in their artificial networks.
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It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification.
In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country’s legacy of unjust housing policies.
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Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo’s hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation.
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Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience.
In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays out the seemingly irreconciliable theoretical commitments of ecological psychology and neuroscience, and then defends a framework for reconciling them: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). According to Favela, who is an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at the University of Central Florida, complexity science provides the conceptual tools that can help integrate these frameworks, such as by articulating the key notion of affordances in ecological psychology as a kind of dimensional reduction in complexity science.
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When we think of censorship, our minds might turn to state agencies exercising power to silence dissent. However, contemporary concerns about censorship arise in contexts where non-state actors suppress expression and communication. There are subtle and not-so-subtle forms of interference that come from social groups, employers, media corporations, and even search engines. Should these “new” forms of censorship alarm us? Should we assess them in ways that mirror our typical views about state-enacted censorship? If not, how should we think about non-state modes of censorship?
In Private Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2024), JP Messina takes up these broad questions. He examines a range of emerging sites of non-state censorship – what he calls “private” censorship – and sorts through the normative, political, and legal issues.
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How can we understand the changing power of race and gender to shape our reality? How shared is reality? Can narratives of experience help us develop these analyses? What role does embodiment play in shaping experience? In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference (Lexington Books, 2024), Emily S. Lee uses the tools of critical phenomenology to deeply engage with the theoretical work of women of color to approach these questions. Through reconstructing phenomenological approaches, particularly as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee helps us see past a naturalization of the identity group “women of color” to understand more deeply the coalitional struggle its articulation involves.
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"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given current scientific theory. He distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously – like being a brain in a vat – from those that are just plausible enough to deserve playful, yet motivated, consideration.
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the AMOUNT of "you know"s is just unbearable.
📖💭
superficial, this philosopher doesn't even understand what AI is
fix your actions
how long has this importnat thought travel because i had these questions on back back burner. i never went to school i educated myselef. i went towards a spritaul awaking because i felt i was a bad aspect in this world so when i fixed all my wrong ways my life would finally recieve success.so i had to get rid of all these questions i would be confession. and plus i had karama becuse i question every unervisal law. so l put myself on top so many people challenged that. and only thing i have left is diginty. there is no wrong answers until all my questions or my conffession i must bring up. but i wont speak until i see someone else belief is on my level.because i dont want to hurt any more people and im stilll stuck were i should go next. its like my elders tech me i tecah them then i go back to the young or who ever is not capable understanding becuse i can understand so many people on so many level. so i just want my world to be a better. so if i help u and u help someone else but that