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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301
Brian Epstein, “The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Fo...
The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully e...
69 min
302
Leif Wenar, “Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and ...
Chances are that at this very moment, you are either looking at a computer screen, holding a digital device, or listening to my voice through plastic earphones. Our computers and these other devices are constructed out of materials that have their orig...
62 min
303
David J. Stump, “Conceptual Change and the Phil...
Ever since Kant argued that there was a category of truths, the synthetic a priori, that grounded the possibility of empirical knowledge, philosophers have debated the concept of a priori knowledge in science.
64 min
304
Rivka Weinberg, “The Risk of a Lifetime: How, W...
We don’t commonly think of procreation as a moral issue. But why not? When you think about it, creating another person seems like a morally weighty thing to do. And we tend to think that procreation under certain conditions would be irresponsible,
64 min
305
Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imper...
Nothing seems so obviously true as the claim that pains feel bad, that pain and suffering go together. Almost as obviously, it seems that the function of pain is to inform us of tissue damage. In What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain (T...
62 min
306
S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxfor...
It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least,
70 min
307
Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture:...
Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the phil...
69 min
308
Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: ...
We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of try...
65 min
309
Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography...
We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being ir...
70 min
310
Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible...
Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do.
61 min
311
Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxf...
How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighe...
62 min
312
Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples...
There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage?
65 min
313
M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Scien...
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from...
64 min
314
Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Underst...
The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one...
58 min
315
Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and t...
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions i...
60 min
316
Max Deutsch, “The Myth of the Intuitive: Experi...
There is a movement in contemporary philosophy known as “experimental philosophy” or “x-phi” for short. It proceeds against the backdrop of a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy. According to the Xi-phi critique,
77 min
317
Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Mod...
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences,
66 min
318
Kevin Vallier, “Liberal Politics and Public Fai...
In a liberal democracy, citizens share political power as equals. This means that they must decide laws and policies collectively. Yet they disagree about fundamental questions regarding the value, purpose, and meaning of life.
69 min
319
Helen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural Hi...
In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science ...
61 min
320
L. A. Paul, “Transformative Experience” (Oxford...
We typically make decisions based on a projection of their likely outcome with respect to the things we value. We seek to maximize of enhance the things we think are good, and minimize what we think is bad.
54 min
321
M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontolo...
Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language,
71 min
322
Jason Stanley, “How Propaganda Works” (Princeto...
Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and imagery are employed for the purpose of shaping mass opin...
63 min
323
Wayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014)
The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time,
65 min
324
George Sher, “Equality for Inegalitarians” (Cam...
There’s a longstanding debate in political philosophy regarding the fundamental point or aim of justice. According to one prominent view, the point of justice is to neutralize the influence of luck over individuals’ shares of basic social goods.
68 min
325
Marya Schechtman, “Staying Alive: Personal Iden...
What is it to be the same person over time? The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke approached this question from a forensic standpoint: persons are identified over time with an appropriately related series of psychological states,
67 min