New Books in Philosophy

Kristoffer Ahlstrom-VijView on AmazonMany 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, we have good reason to seek to be epistemologically healthy. Yet we know that as fallible creatures we are prone to a wide variety of systematic errors and pitfalls.  So we should seek to improve ourselves epistemically.  However, we also know that our reasoning is vulnerable to dysfunctions that we find hard to detect in ourselves. And even if they are detected, these dysfunctions are difficult to correct.  What should we do? In Epistemic Paternalism: A Defence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij makes the case that we cannot rely on ourselves for epistemic improvement, but must endorse a general policy of epistemic paternalism.  Epistemic paternalism, he says, is the policy of interfering with an agent's inquiry, for the epistemic good of the agent, without need of the agent's consent.  This is an engaging and rigorously argued book.  Let's turn to the interview.

Michael StrevensView on AmazonWhen we're faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there's an equal chance of the prize being behind any of the doors? How is it that we are generally correct to choose the shorter of two checkout lines in the supermarket when we're in a hurry? In his new book, Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure (Harvard University Press, 2013), Michael Strevens – professor of philosophy at New York University, argues that we are all equipped with a reliable, probable innate, and not fully conscious skill at probabilistic reasoning — a "physical intuition" that enables us to infer physical probabilities from perceived symmetries. This skill is found in six-month-old infants watching as red and white balls are removed in different proportions from an urn. But it also underlies important advances in the sciences, such as James Clerk Maxwell's reasoning when he hit upon the correct distribution of velocities of a moving particle in a gas. In this intriguing essay on a very special type of cognitive capacity, Strevens defends controversial claims about the rules guiding our reasoning about physical probability, its probable innateness, and its role in science as well as in everyday judgment.

Josef SternView on AmazonThe 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, or as an exegesis of rabbinical texts. In The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide (Harvard University Press, 2013), Josef Stern provides an entirely distinct reading of this singular work. Stern, William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, argues that for Maimonides, reason and religion are just one domain, not two that need to be reconciled; that biblical parable is a literary device used to articulate our incomplete understanding of truths about general welfare and individual happiness; and that Maimonides is primarily motivated by the question of what the best attainable human life can be given our embodied nature. The Guide is in effect a primer that trains the reader to tease apart the multiple meanings of biblical texts – even though these exercises will not yield knowledge of metaphysics and cosmology, including knowledge of God. Stern combines deep familiarity with Maimonides, his works, and his intellectual environment with expertise in contemporary philosophy of language in this major contribution to historical-philosophical scholarship.

David EdmondsView on AmazonThe 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.  If you do nothing, they will be killed by the trolley.  But you can flip a switch, thereby turning the trolley onto a spur, where there is only one person tied.  In this case, most people claim that one should indeed save the five by turning the trolley, even though this means that the one will be killed. But consider the second case, which is like the first but for this difference: there is no spur onto which one could turn the trolley, but one could push a fat man onto the track whose size is sufficient to stop the trolley from killing the five.  Again: Should you push the fat man, thereby saving five lives at the expense of one? Here, most people's intuition flips: You may not push the fat man.  But why not?  What is the difference between the first and second cases?  This is the question at the core of trolleyology.  And philosophers have explored the complexities of these (and many, many other) trolley scenarios for several decades running. In his new book, Would You Kill the Fat Man? (Princeton University Press, 2014), David Edmonds tells the story of trolleyology, bringing into focus all of the crucial philosophical distinctions that must be made if we are to understand it and canvassing the related empirical literature about real-time moral decision-making.  This book is a work of rigorous philosophy that is also widely accessible.

Sarah PessinView on AmazonNeoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of "invisible floating Kansas" in which spatiotemporal talk isn't really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol's Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle's notion of Prime Matter. Pessin's provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a "completely mischaracterized" figure and period.

Joseph CarensView on AmazonIt is commonly assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who must leave.  But even supposing that there is such a right, we may ask the decidedly moral question about how it may be exercised.  And this query calls us to try to bring our views about the ethics of immigration into equilibrium with our other moral convictions about citizenship, liberty, and equality.   Can our common views and practices concerning immigration be rendered consistent with these deeper commitments? In The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), Joseph Carens argues that our common commitment to democratic principles requires us to revise much of our thinking about immigration.  Beginning with the uncontroversial practice of granting citizenship immediately to those born within a country's territory, Carens argues that claims to social membership and thus to citizenship strengthen as individuals stay in a state; consequently, there is a point at which not extending citizenship to those living within a state's borders is grossly immoral, even for those who have settled without the state's permission.  Carens' arguments about the moral constraints on the state's rights to exclude eventuate in an argument in favor of open borders.

Michael WeisbergView on AmazonIn 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and observed the result. The model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be: it would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Weisberg examines the nature, development and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at concrete models (such as the Bay Area model), computational models and mathematical models to argue for a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures, and their relation to the part of the world they model is in terms of weighted feature-mapping. His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science.

Michael HuemerView on AmazonThe philosopher Robert Nozick once claimed that the most basic question of Political Philosophy is "Why not Anarchy?"  Political philosophers pose this question often with the intent of demonstrating that there is indeed a good philosophical reason why governments should exist.  Indeed, we often simply take for granted that the state and its vast coercive apparatus is morally justified.  Similarly, we tend to think that anarchy is both a practically untenable and morally undesirable mode of social association.  But governments claim not only power but authority over their citizens.  And a few moments of reflection on the idea of authority suffices to see how curious an idea it is.  To have authority is to have a right to create moral obligations in others simply by issuing commands, and a corresponding right to coerce compliance when others fail to obey one's commands.  It seems a puzzling phenomenon: The government claim to be able to make it the case that you're morally required to do something simply in virtue of the fact that it has told you to do it. And they claim the moral right to imprison you for failing to do what they say. In The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Michael Huemer explores this puzzling phenomenon, and defends the conclusion that in fact there is no such thing as political authority.

Jennifer A. McMahonView on AmazonArt and ethics are linked philosophically by the fact that they are both fall under value theory; and some aestheticians, notably Berys Gaut, have argued for a direct connection between aesthetic and moral values, in that the moral values that an artwork may embody can raise or lower its aesthetic value. In Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant's Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2013), Jennifer A. McMahon argues that aesthetic and moral judgments are intrinsically linked by the fact that they contain a common element of community-calibrated subjective responses, and that as a result by reflecting on art we also exercise this element of moral judgment. McMahon, who is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, draws on Kant, pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, contemporary philosophers of mind such as Susanna Siegel, and interviews with contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson and Doris Salcedo, to argue for and illustrate her view.

R. Jay WallaceView on AmazonOur moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past.  Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past.  But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm.  That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our present would not be.  How is this mixture of regret and affirmation to be understood? In his new book, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford University Press, 2013), R. Jay Wallace explores the complicated dynamic surrounding regret and affirmation.  He develops a view that reconciles the apparent contradiction between regretting something that was a necessary antecedent to some attachment that one must now affirm.  But in laying out this reconciliation, Wallace uncovers a pervasive and disconcerting truth about the human condition, namely that we must affirm aspects of our lives that are undeniably the products of highly objectionable features of the past.

Muhammad Ali KhalidiView on AmazonThe division between natural kinds – the kinds that 'cut nature at its joints' – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Muhammad Ali Khalidi, associate professor of philosophy at York University, argues for what he calls an "epistemic" view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues. On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially-constructed.

Tadeusz ZawidzkiView on AmazonSocial cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don't have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls "mindshaping". Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural learners, and to conform to and enforce social norms, and in Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (MIT Press, 2013), Zawidzki defends the idea that mind-shaping is the basic capacity from which the rest of social cognition evolves. Most researchers hold that mind-reading – our "theory of mind" – is the linch-pin of the rest: our ability to ascribe to one another mental states with propositional content is necessary for sophisticated language use and for mindshaping. Zawidzki argues, in contrast, that our ability to "homogenize" our minds via mindshaping is what makes sophisticated mind-reading and language possible. On his view, language didn't evolve so that we could express thought; it evolved so that we could express our commitment to cooperative behavior. Zawidzki's innovative approach centers on reinterpreting and extending Daniel Dennett's intentional stance to explain the social-cognitive development of the species and of individuals.

Thom BrooksView on AmazonSocial stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules.  And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced.  Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break the rules.  Hence society features a broad system of institutions by which we punish.  But there is a deep and longstanding philosophical disagreement over what, precisely, punishment is for.  The standard views are easy to anticipate.  Some say that we punish in order to give offenders what they deserve.  Others claim that we punish in order to encourage others to obey the rules.  Still others see punishment as a process of rehabilitating offenders.  Recent theorists have attempted to combine these views in various ways.  The debates go on. In his new book, Punishment (Routledge, 2012), Thom Brooks reviews the leading debates concerning punishment and makes a compelling case for a distinctive theory of punishment called the "unified theory."  Brooks contends that the unified theory can embrace several highly intuitive penal goals while avoiding the philosophical difficulties confronting each of the competing theories.

Berit BrogaardView on AmazonPropositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief, desire and other propositional attitudes; they are what we agree and disagree about in conversation, and they are what is communicated in successful discourse. By philosophical tradition, propositions have their truth values eternally; that is, they always include a reference to a time as a component, and if true, they are always true. The proposition expressed in English by the sentence It is raining in Malta is more completely expressed by something like It is raining in Malta at noon local time on May 4, 2013. This standard view is called eternalism. In her new book Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard, associate professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, calls this traditional view into question. Brogaard defends temporalism, the claim that some propositions do not have their truth values eternally – they lack a time-stamp. She argues instead that eternalists cannot adequately explain how we retain beliefs over time, how we modify beliefs, and how we agree and disagree over the span of an ordinary conversation, and she presents a new argument for temporalism from the phenomenology of conscious mental states. Her lucid and comprehensive discussion is a milestone in debates about our experience of time as expressed in natural language.

Christopher HookwayView on AmazonCharles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism.  He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as "the pragmatic maxim."  According to this maxim, the meaning of a concept or a proposition is ultimately to be defined in terms of the "sensible" and "practical" effects it would produce in the course of experimental action. That is, of course, a crude articulation.  But, according to Peirce, the view of meaning that the maxim articulates has vast philosophical implications.  Peirce's pragmatism is at once anti-skeptical, fallibilist, verificationist, inferentialist, and realist.  Indeed, that looks like a motley crowd of philosophical commitments.  How might they be made to hang together? In his new book, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), Christopher Hookway explores the complexities of Peirce's philosophy.  With chapters devoted to topics ranging from Peirce's fallibilism, his philosophy of language, his views on mathematics, his rejection of psychologism, and his theory of abduction, Hookway presents Peircean pragmatism as a formidable and strikingly contemporary philosophy.  Hookway's book will be of great interest to anyone interested in pragmatism and the history of 20th-century philosophy, but it also has much to offer to those working on current debates in fields like epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic.