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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376
Roslyn Weiss, “Philosophers in the Republic” (C...
Contemporary philosophers still wrestle mightily with Plato’s Republic. A common reading has it that in the Republic, Plato’s character Socrates defends a conception of justice according to which reason should rule the soul and philosophers should rule...
66 min
377
Beth Preston, “A Philosophy of Material Culture...
Many philosophers have written on the ways in which human beings produce artifacts and on the nature of artifacts themselves, often distinguishing the act of producing or making from growing, and distinguishing artifacts from natural objects. However,
63 min
378
Clayton Littlejohn, “Justification and the Trut...
There is a long-standing debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification. Internalists think that a belief is justified in virtue of certain facts internal to the believer. Externalists deny this; they hold that facts o...
63 min
379
Herman Cappelen, “Philosophy Without Intuitions...
It’s taken for granted among analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry – ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, in particular – involve a special and characteristic methodology that depends essentia...
64 min
380
Brian Leiter, “Why Tolerate Religion?” (Princet...
Religious conviction enjoys a privileged status in our society.This is perhaps most apparent in legal contexts, where religious conviction is often given special consideration. To be more precise, religious conscience is recognized as a legitimate basi...
66 min
381
Alva Noe, “Varieties of Presence” (Harvard UP, ...
What do we experience we look at an object – say, a tomato? A traditional view holds that we entertain an internal picture or representation of the tomato, and moreover that this internal picture is of the surface of the tomato, and not, say,
63 min
382
Corey Brettschneider, “When the State Speaks, W...
Liberal democracies are in the business of protecting individuals and their rights. Central among these are the rights to free expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience. Liberal democracies are also in the business of sustaining a p...
68 min
383
Miguel de Beistegui, “Aesthetics after Metaphys...
What is the nature of art? The question involves understanding the relation between art and reality and what we are expressing in art. Miguel de Beistegui, professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick,
58 min
384
Jamie Kelly, “Framing Democracy: A Behavioral A...
Plato famously argued that democracy is nearly the worst form of government because citizens are decidedly unwise. Many styles of democratic theory have tried to meet Plato’s argument by denying that democracy has anything to do with wisdom.
70 min
385
Jill Gordon, “Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic...
It’s traditional in Plato scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways. One common division is a temporal one that distinguishes among early, middle and late dialogues. Another is by content: there are the so-called erotic dialogues,
61 min
386
Nicole Hassoun, “Globalization and Global Justi...
Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverishe...
50 min
387
Kristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a...
The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to so...
64 min
388
Paul Weithman, “Why Political Liberalism? On Jo...
It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are marked mainly by the publication of his two major book...
74 min
389
Lee Braver, “Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wit...
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are both considered among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Both were born in 1889 in German-speaking countries; both studied under leading philosophers of their day – Bertrand Russell ...
70 min
390
Anthony Laden, “Reasoning: A Social Picture” (O...
According to a view familiar to philosophers, reasoning is a process that occurs within an individual mind and is aimed specifically at demonstrating on the basis of statement that we accept the correctness of some other statement. We reason, that is,
70 min
391
Helen Steward, “A Metaphysics for Freedom” (Oxf...
The basic problem of free will is quite simple to pose: do we ever act freely? One of the traditional “no” answers comes from the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that everything that happens had to happen given the initial condition...
67 min
392
Kok-Chor Tan, “Justice, Institutions, and Luck:...
Justice requires that each person gets what he or she deserves. Luck is a matter of good or bad things simply befalling people; hence luck distributes to people things they do not deserve. Justice must then be in the business of morally correcting the ...
76 min
393
Eric Marcus, “Rational Causation” (Harvard UP, ...
We often explain actions and beliefs by citing the reasons for which they are done or believed. The reason I took off my hat at the funeral was because I was paying respect to the deceased. The reason I believed that taking off my hat was appropriate w...
64 min
394
Elizabeth Brake, “Minimizing Marriage: Marriage...
From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable. At the same time,
64 min
395
Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science...
We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of historians of science and philosophers of science.
65 min
396
Michael Lynch, “In Praise of Reason” (MIT Press...
Modern society seems in awe of the advances of science and technology. We commonly praise innovations that enable us to live longer and more comfortable lives, we look forward to the release of new gadgets,
70 min
397
Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Ox...
Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that...
69 min
398
Karen Stohr, “On Manners” (Routledge, 2011)
We rarely stop to notice that our everyday social interactions are governed by a highly complex system of rules. Though often only implicit, there are rules governing how to board an elevator, how close one may stand to another when in conversation,
64 min
399
Uriah Kriegel, “The Sources of Intentionality” ...
It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your mother’s new hairdo, and phenomenal states,
65 min
400
Allen Buchanan, “Better than Human: The Promise...
Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently,
76 min