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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326
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
327
Seana Shiffrin, “Speech Matters: On Lying, Mora...
It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms.
68 min
328
Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self a...
The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousnes...
63 min
329
Carol Gould, “Interactive Democracy: The Social...
Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller. It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan. These advances potentially bring considerable benefit...
64 min
330
Erik C. Banks, “The Realistic Empiricism of Mac...
The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified with the rest of nature,
67 min
331
Terence Cuneo, “Speech and Morality: On the Met...
It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding,
63 min
332
Joelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition...
Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Pr...
61 min
333
Claudio Lopez-Guerra, “Democracy and Disenfranc...
Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet,
66 min
334
Eric Steinhart, “Your Digital Afterlives: Compu...
What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life After Dea...
66 min
335
Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Agency: A Planning ...
One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking do...
65 min
336
Stephen Yablo, “Aboutness” (Princeton UP, 2014 )
A day after Stephen Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained, “You never take me for ice cream any more.” Yablo initially responded that this was obviously false. But Yablo,
67 min
337
Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof,...
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological ent...
83 min
338
Richard Fumerton, “Knowledge, Thought, and the ...
A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When she sees a red tomato for the first time,
69 min
339
Samuel Scheffler, “Death and the Afterlife” (Ox...
Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value.
59 min
340
Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind”...
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan,
64 min
341
Elise Springer, “Communicating Moral Concern: A...
The long tradition of moral philosophy employs a familiar collection of basic concepts. These include concepts like agent, act, intention, consequence, responsibility, obligation, the right, and the good. Typically,
63 min
342
Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational...
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different w...
65 min
343
Simon Blackburn, “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and ...
At the heart of our moral thinking lies trouble with our selves. The self lies at morality’s core; selves are intimately connected to the proper objects of moral evaluation. But a common theme of moral theory is that the self,
57 min
344
Jakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, ...
The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism: a process of...
64 min
345
Mark Alfano, “Character as Moral Fiction” (Camb...
According to a longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character. Aristotle stands at the head of this tradition,
64 min
346
Melinda B. Fagan, “Philosophy of Stem Cell Biol...
Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”. But even in philosophy of biology,
68 min
347
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, “Epistemic Paternalism...
Many of our goals and aspirations in life depend upon our epistemological capabilities. Our attempts to do the right thing or live a good life can be greatly hampered if we are unable to form true beliefs and resist false ones. Consequently,
75 min
348
Adrienne Martin, “How We Hope: A Moral Psycholo...
From political campaigns to sports stadiums and hospital rooms, the concept of hope is pervasive. And the story we tend to tell ourselves about hope is that it is intrinsically a good thing — in many ways we still tend to think of hope as a kind of vir...
45 min
349
Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides...
The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth,
68 min
350
David Edmonds, “Would You Kill the Fat Man?” (P...
The trolley problem is a staple of contemporary moral philosophy. It centers around two scenarios involving a runaway trolley. In the first, a trolley is barreling down a track without any brakes; off in the distance five people are tied to the track...
66 min