New Books in Philosophy

Brian P. CopenhaverView on AmazonBelief 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 philosopher's stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke.

Carlos FraenkelView on AmazonWe 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 trying to incite debate and critical reflection among our fellow citizens. That is, we acknowledge that, apart from its existence as a technical discipline, Philosophy is a kind of civic activity that, we hope, can help us to address life's biggest questions, even when we find ourselves deeply divided over their answers. In Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World (Princeton University Press, 2015), Carlos Fraenkel tells the tale of his attempts to recapture Philosophy's Socratic dimension. He recounts his adventures in doing philosophy in nonstandard contexts, with atypical interlocutors, and in unfamiliar places. Along the way, we see a hopeful and encouraging vision of philosophy emerge as a collection of rational techniques and intellectual virtues that can, indeed, rescue our individual and collective lives from impending incivility.

Nancy BauerView on AmazonWe 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 irrelevant and argues that philosophers should emulate Socrates in giving people reasons to reflect on their settled views. Bauer, who is professor of philosophy and dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences at Tufts University, considers the sexual objectification of women in contemporary society from several overlapping angles. She discusses the sense of empowerment that young women feel in today's 'hookup culture' and defends a radical new reading J.L. Austin's work on language that is at odds with the standard interpretation behind prominent feminist critiques of pornography. She also considers how white male dominance in academic philosophy has contributed to its lack of effectiveness, while applauding recent efforts by some to increase its diversity and its engagement with the public.

Lisa TessmanView on AmazonMoral 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. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act. In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority.

Miriam SolomonView on AmazonHow 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 weighed against the clinician's hard-won judgment from treating hundreds of patients? These are some of the questions that are considered by Miriam Solomon in Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2015). Solomon, who is professor of philosophy at Temple University, provides an historically grounded critical assessment of the methods used in recent decades to turn basic science results into medical knowledge: consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine.

Stephen MacedoView on AmazonThere 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? But there are philosophical questions as well. What is the purpose of marriage? What are the goods that marriage helps individuals realize? Once marriage is no longer understood to be restricted to heterosexual couples, must we then question whether it should be restricted to couples? Why not recognize plural marital arrangements? Why should there be a civil institution of marriage at all? In Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015), Stephen Macedo explores a range of philosophical, moral, and legal issues pertaining to marriage. He argues that, as a matter of justice, marriage rights must be extended to same-sex couples. But he also argues that marriage as an institution should be restricted to monogamous couples. Along the way, Macedo engages with opponents across the political spectrum, from Natural Law theorists who contend that marriage is intrinsically a heterosexual relation to contemporary feminist philosophers who argue for expanding marriage to encompass plural networks of care.

View on AmazonWhat 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 different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don't have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.

Cass SunsteinView on AmazonThe 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's occupation, one's values, one's hobbies, one's possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill's view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Chad EngellandView on AmazonHow 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 in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015).  Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on historical and contemporary figures and continental and analytical traditions, he defends an embodied view of ostension in which we directly perceive intentions in ostension rather than infer to them, and gives an account of how we are able to disambiguate gestures through the joint presence of objects in a shared environment.

Max DeutschView on AmazonThere 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, analytic philosophers rely too heavily on an unsound method which involves arguing for philosophical conclusions from premises whose force rests solely in what philosophers find "intuitive" or "obvious." Using polling and survey methods, experimental philosophers show that claims that philosophers often take to be "intuitive" are in fact not commonly held among non-philosophers, and that individuals' sense of what's "obvious" varies according to factors such as ethnicity, geography, age, and gender. In light of this, X-philes claim that analytic philosophy is doomed, for it treats philosophers' intuitions as evidence in favor of philosophical claims. But the variability of intuitions shows that intuitions have no evidentiary weight. In The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method (MIT, 2015), Max Deutsch defends analytic philosophy against the x-phi critique by showing that, in fact, analytic philosophers do not treat intuitions as evidence. Drawing on careful readings of the texts that are the central targets of the x-phi critique, Deutsch shows that analytic philosophers rarely appeal to intuitions as if they provided evidential support.

Buy This Book 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 can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also consider whether theism provides a good reason for the pervasiveness of religious belief across human societies across time, and argue that the seemingly obvious conclusion that a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs debunks these beliefs is not at all obvious.

L. A. PaulView on AmazonWe 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. But sometimes we are faced with a decision where we must choose whether to undergo an experience that will likely transform us in fundamental ways, perhaps even change our sense of what's valuable or important. Indeed, sometimes we must choose whether to in effect become a different kind of person. How should decisions like these be made? In Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014), L. A. Paul examines a range of cases where agents must choose whether or not be transformed in fundamental ways that they, the agents, cannot grasp in advance of the transformation. As it turns out, choices of this transformative kind are far more common than one might think.

M. Joshua MozerskyView on AmazonIs 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, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), M. Joshua Mozersky, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University, argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and provides an account of tensed language in which the underlying meaning of "was", "is", and "will be" is actually tenseless. Mozersky deftly defends his eternalist view by countering arguments for the main alternatives, in which only the present exists, or at most only the past and the present exist, and by showing how eternalism provides the best account of the passage of time and is not just consistent with three-dimensionalism (or endurantism) but also provides the best account of it.

Wayne WuView on AmazonThe 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, and our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? In Attention (Routledge, 2014) Wayne Wu argues for the view that attention is selection for action and is distinct from consciousness. This controversial position pits him against more common views that attention is in some sense essentially connected to consciousness – for example, that it is a kind of gatekeeper for consciousness. Wu, an Associate Professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, draws on empirical literature from psychology and neuroscience to develop his view while acknowledging how difficult it is to interpret results so as to support one theory or another.

George SherBuy this Book 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. This view is known as luck egalitarianism. It holds, roughly, that inequality is consistent with justice only if it is due to individuals' choices rather than their luck. Luck egalitarianism has an undeniable intuitive appeal, and hence has been the subject of a range of critiques and defenses for the past several decades. In Equality for Inegalitarians (Cambridge University Press, 2014), George Sher offers a decisive critical assessment of luck egalitarianism, and develops his own positive view about distributive justice. According to Sher, the aim of justice is to enable each individual to live his or her life effectively. This requires that each be provided a sufficient share of central social goods. But it also requires that individuals be permitted to suffer the consequences of their choices.