New Books in Philosophy
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.
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251
Elizabeth F. Cohen, “The Political Value of Tim...
We’re all familiar with some of the ways that time figures into our political environment. Things such as term limits, waiting periods, deadlines, and criminal sentences readily come to mind. But there are also protocols, accords, mandates,
66 min
252
Edouard Machery, “Philosophy Within Proper Boun...
There are five people on the track and a runaway trolley that will hit them, and you are on a footbridge over the track with a large person whose body can stop the trolley in its tracks. Should you push the large person to his death to save the five...
62 min
253
William A. Edmundson, “John Rawls: Reticent Soc...
John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of justice begins are now components of the philosophical ve...
62 min
254
Ruth G. Millikan, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, L...
Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic,
62 min
255
Christian B. Miller, “The Character Gap: How Go...
My guest today is Christian Miller. Christian is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is a moral philosopher specializing on character, with special interest in the empirical study of the virtues and vices.
58 min
256
Alexus McLeod, “Philosophy of the Ancient Maya:...
The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018),
64 min
257
Gloria Origgi, “Reputation: What it is and Why ...
We all put a great deal of care into protecting, managing, and monitoring our reputation. But the precise nature of a reputation is obscure. In one sense, reputation is merely hearsay, a popular perception that may or may not have any basis in fact.
59 min
258
Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a...
Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift f...
63 min
259
Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defens...
The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example,
60 min
260
Bart Streumer, “Unbelievable Errors: An Error T...
It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,
62 min
261
Sam Cowling, “Abstract Entities” (Routledge, 2017)
Here’s a true sentence: The number seven is odd. What’s philosophically odd about the sentence is that it seems to imply that there must be numbers, including the number seven just as the truth of The Statue of Liberty is in New York implies that there...
65 min
262
Kieran Setiya, “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide”...
Middle-agedness is a curious phenomenon. In many ways, one is at one’s peak and also at the early stages of decline. There is much to do, but also dozens of paths irretrievably untaken. Successes, but also regrets.
63 min
263
Owen Flanagan, “The Geography of Morals: Variet...
What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology,
64 min
264
Daniel R. DeNicola, “Understanding Ignorance: T...
Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so,
60 min
265
Susanna Siegel, “The Rationality of Perception”...
Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him,
67 min
266
Jean Kazez, “The Philosophical Parent: Asking t...
We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child.
52 min
267
Ron Mallon, “The Construction of Human Kinds” (...
Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world,
62 min
268
Alfred Moore, “Critical Elitism: Deliberation, ...
According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious o...
61 min
269
Jan De Winter, “Interests and Epistemic Integri...
In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-episte...
62 min
270
Kristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From...
When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren’t born with it,
63 min
271
Alejandra Mancilla, “The Right of Necessity: Mo...
We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death,
64 min
272
Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A M...
A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations.
62 min
273
Justin Snedegar, “Contrastive Reasons” (Oxford ...
When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be ...
66 min
274
Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Sh...
Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct,
63 min
275
Peter Balint, “Respecting Toleration: Tradition...
The freedoms prized and secured in a modern liberal democratic societies give rise to significant forms of moral and social diversity. In many cases, these forms of diversity must be dealt with by the state and its citizens.
58 min