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
David Rondel, “Pragmatist Egalitarianism” (Oxfo...
Pragmatism is a longstanding philosophical idiom that advocates public-facing philosophy – philosophy that abandons merely academic puzzles and addresses itself to the social and political problems of the day.
65 min
252
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (M...
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example,
65 min
253
Candice Delmas, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobed...
According to a long tradition in political philosophy, there are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by a legitimate political authority. That is, it is common for political philosophers to recognize the permissib...
65 min
254
Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integ...
A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theories are committed to the existence only of those things t...
62 min
255
Shelley Tremain, “Foucault and Feminist Philoso...
How should we understand disability? In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Dr. Shelley Tremain explores this complex question from the perspective of feminist philosophy,
32 min
256
Brian O’Connor, “Idleness: A Philosophical Essa...
Culturally, idleness is widely derided as laziness, uselessness, and sloth. Even within philosophy, the idle are criticized for being wasteful, selfish, and free-loading. Indeed, throughout the history of moral and political philosophy,
58 min
257
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in...
62 min
258
Steven Gimbel, “Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophi...
Humor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions. As one would expect,
64 min
259
Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science”...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.
65 min
260
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
261
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
262
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
263
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
264
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
265
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
266
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
267
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
268
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
269
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
270
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
271
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
272
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
273
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
274
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
275
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