New Books in Philosophy

Julia TanneyView on AmazonIt is fair to say that philosophy of mind and the sciences of the mind quite generally adhere to an information-processing model of cognition. A standard version holds that there are events going on in the brain that represent the world, and that familiar psychological terms are used to refer to these events. In Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2012), Julia Tanney, Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent, mounts a sustained attack on this dominant view. Taking her cue from Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tanney argues that reasons for action are not content-bearing mental states, and being rational is not learning certain rules. Instead, mental state ascriptions, in particular those of propositional attitudes, have the function of encapsulating or "marking" sense-making patterns of thoughts, actions, and sayings that are learned through acculturation. Understanding the mind starts from the perspective of reasons-explanations, which invoke these sense-making patterns: to ascribe a mental state to others and ourselves is to indicate a particular pattern, not refer to an event in the brain.

Kimberley BrownleeView on AmazonWhen confronted with a law that they find morally unconscionable, citizens sometimes engage in civil disobedience – they publicly break the law with a view to communicating their judgment that it is unjust.  Citizens in similar situations sometimes take a different stance – they engage in conscientious objection, they quietly disobey, seeking only to keep their own conscience clear. A common view of these matters has it that the conscientious objector is deserving of special respect, and even accommodation, whereas the civil disobedient engages in a politically risky and morally questionable practice.  In her new book, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012) Kimberley Brownlee reverses this picture.  She contends that properly-conducted civil disobedience is more deserving of accommodation and respect than conscientious objection.  Her case turns on a detailed and subtle analysis of the very concepts of conviction and conscience.

Helen LonginoView on AmazonWhat explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the "both" answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated.

Philip PettitView on AmazonIn political philosophy, republicanism is the name of a distinctive framework for thinking about politics. At its core is a unique conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in non-domination, that is, in not having a master or lord, in not being subject to the arbitrary will of another.  This republican conception of the free person contrasts with a competing and familiar view according to which freedom is primarily a property, not of persons, but of choices.  On this view, one is free insofar as one enjoys the absence of interference. For the past few decades, Philip Pettit has been engaged in a sustained effort to revive republicanism as an approach to political philosophy. In a series of articles and books, he has developed and defended the republican conception of freedom.  In his latest book, On The People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Pettit articulates a conception of democracy to accompany the fundamental republican commitment to freedom as non-domination. The book examines the full range of topics, from justice to legitimacy and institutional design.  This is a highly detailed and meticulously argued book.

View on AmazonAmong the very many puzzling aspects of the physical world is this: how do we explain the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are time-asymmetric while those of statistical mechanics are time-symmetric? If the fundamental physical laws do not require events to occur in any particular temporal direction, why do we observe a world in which, for example, we will always see milk dispersing in tea but never coming together in tea – at least not unless we film the dispersal and then run the film backwards? In The Road to Maxwell's Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Meir Hemmo of the University of Haifa and Orly Shenker of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provide a fascinating and accessible defense of the position that the laws of thermodynamics are observer-relative, that the evolutions of physical microstates in classical mechanics have a direction of time but no determinate direction, and that the relation between observers and the dynamics determines the direction of time that we observe and capture in our thermodynamical laws. In consequence, they argue, it's just a contingent fact that we remember the past rather than the future, and Maxwellian Demons – perpetual motion machines that can exploit more and more energy while putting in less and less work – are possible.

Cheryl MisakView on AmazonPragmatism is American's home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood.  This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest proponents: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.  Although it is agreed that they are the founders of Pragmatism, they also held opposing views about meaning, truth, reality, and value.  A further complication emerges in that it is widely believed that Pragmatism was purged from the philosophical mainstream and rendered dormant sometime around 1950, and then recovered only in the 1980s by Richard Rorty. In her new book, The American Pragmatists (Oxford University Press, 2013), Cheryl Misak presents a nuanced analysis of the origins, development, and prospects of Pragmatism.  She shows that Pragmatism has always come in a variety of flavors, ranging from the highly objectivist views of Peirce and C. I. Lewis to the more subjectivist commitments of James and Richard Rorty.  More importantly, Misak demonstrates that Pragmatism has been a constantly evolving philosophical movement that has consistently shaped the landscape of English-language philosophy.  On Misak's account, Pragmatism is the philosophical thread that runs through the work of the most influential philosophers of the past century.  Her book will be of interest to anyone with interest in Pragmatism or twentieth-century philosophy.

Jesse J. PrinzView on AmazonFor decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can't be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism.

Roslyn WeissView on AmazonContemporary 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 the city.  On all accounts, the Republic is centrally concerned with the question of what philosophers are and how they come to be.  A standard reading contends that the multiple discussions in the Republic of the nature of the philosopher all aim to depict the very same kind of creature. In her new book, Philosophers in the Republic: Plato's Two Paradigms (Cornell University Press, 2012), Roslyn Weiss challenges this view.  She argues that the Republic depicts at least two distinct kinds of philosopher.  She then employs this analysis in discussing several puzzles that emerge from the text concerning, for example, the absence of the virtue of piety in the Republic, and the curious similarities between Socrates's conception of justice and moderation.  The result is a fascinating examination of the Republic that has much to offer both to Plato scholars and more casual readers.

Beth PrestonView on AmazonMany 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, such discussions have tended to be theoretically restrictive – for example, in philosophy of technology, the focus is primarily on non-religious and non-artistic artifacts. In A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function and Mind (Routledge 2012), Professor Beth Preston of the University of Georgia provides a foundation for understanding material culture in general – indeed, she uses the phrase "item of material culture" to avoid the restrictive connotations of "artifact". Preston approaches her subject from two basic vantage points: the philosophy of action, to consider the nature of production and use of material culture, and the philosophy of function, to consider the nature of the items that are produced and used. In doing so she breaks new ground in understanding collaboration and improvisation, and draws on work on biological and system functions to develop a concept of 'function' appropriate to understanding the functions of the items we make and use.

Clayton LittlejohnView on AmazonThere 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 of some other kind must obtain in order for a belief to be justified.  In his new book, Justification and the Truth-Connection (Cambridge 2012), Clayton Littlejohn defends a novel version of externalism, one which holds that a belief must be true in order to be justified.  The cover of the book features an intriguing photograph by Sigurdur Gudmundsson that nicely captures Littlejohn's view: In order to meet our epistemic obligations, we must fit ourselves, including our internal belief-forming and deliberative processes as well as our actions, to the world around us.  This view, Littlejohn contends, retains the virtues of justificatory externalism while also providing a compelling account of the concerns regarding epistemic normativity and responsibility that often lie at the core of internalist views of justification.  Littlejohn's book hence is a work of contemporary epistemology that engages deeply with a range of concerns in value theory.

Herman CappelenView on AmazonIt'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 essentially on the use of intuitions as evidence for philosophical positions. A thought experiment is developed in order to elicit intuitive judgments, and these judgments have a special epistemic status. Paradigm cases of this methodology include Gettier cases, in which we judge whether the subject in the scenario has or does not have knowledge, and Putnam's Twin-Earth cases, in which we judge whether the contents of thought depend on the physical nature of a thinker's environment. The new experimental philosophy movement also accepts this assumption, as it is premised on rejecting it by conducting real experiments (with non-philosophers as subjects) rather than thought-experiments. In Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Herman Cappelen, professor of philosophy at the Arche Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews, argues that this assumption is simply false as a descriptive claim about the practice of contemporary analytic philosophy. Instead, a detailed look at the thought experiments shows that uses of the term "intuition" or "intuitively" are better interpreted as an unfortunate verbal tic or as a conversational hedge indicating that a claim is just a snap judgment or a bit of pre-theoretic background. What is not true, he claims, is that the judgments have bedrock epistemological status, are considered justified without appeals to experience and without inference, that inclinations to believe these judgments tend to be recalcitrant to further evidence, or that these judgments are based on conceptual competence or have a special phenomenology.

View on AmazonReligious 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 basis for exemption from standing laws, whereas claims of conscience deriving from non-religious commitments generally are not.  Why is this?  Is there something special about religiously-based claims of conscience?  Is there something special about religion such that it gives rise to claims of conscience that deserve special consideration?  If so, what? In his new book, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, 2013) Brian Leiter offers subtle analyses of toleration, conscience, and respect.  He argues that religion is indeed to be tolerated, because liberty of conscience is a central moral and political ideal.  However, he holds that there's nothing special about religion that gives special moral or legal weight to the demands it places on the consciences of believers.  Contending that all claims of conscience–religious and non-religious–deserve toleration, Leiter argues that legal exemption may be granted on the basis of a claim of conscience–religious or otherwise–only when doing so does not place additional burdens on the non-exempt.

Alva NoëView on AmazonWhat 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, the side of the tomato that is hidden from view. This general view of experience has been criticized for some time by numerous scientists and philosophers, Alva Noë among them. In earlier books, Noe — professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley — has defended the view that our experiences of the world are grounded in practical skills – our abilities to manipulate things, and their availability or accessibility to us. According to this enactive view of perception, the hidden side of the tomato is also in our conscious experience of it – it is, in Noë's words, present as absent. In his new book, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012), Noe elaborates the enactive view further, to explain the nature of presence and of access: how the world shows up to us in experience, and how the way it shows up depends on our modes of access to it.

Corey Brettschneider View on AmazonLiberal 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 political environment in which citizens are regarded as political equals.  In exercising their rights, some citizens will come to hold beliefs and viewpoints that are fundamentally at odds with the idea that all citizens are their equals.  That is, in a free society, some citizens will come to endorse views which reject the idea of a society of free and equal citizens.  Such cases seem to put the liberal democratic state in a bind.  It must permit citizens to adopt and express illiberal and anti-democratic viewpoints, or else violate its commitment to the core freedoms it prizes.  Yet the spread of such viewpoints, and sometimes even their very expression, can threaten the equality other citizens and undermine the stability of a democratic society.   What should the state do? In his new book, When the State Speaks, What Should it Say?  How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality (Princeton University Press, 2012), Corey Brettschneider proposes a view he calls "value democracy" to address this kind of quandary.  He claims that although the democratic state must permit the adoption and expression of even hateful views, it nonetheless can object to and criticize them.  That is, Brettschneider makes a case for thinking that the state is permitted to–and in some contexts must–employ its expressive power to combat hateful viewpoints.  The book hence addresses fundamental philosophical questions concerning free speech, equality, and the authority of the democratic state.

Miguel de BeisteguiView on AmazonWhat 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, addresses these questions in his latest book, Aesthetics after Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (Routledge, 2012). De Beistegui's framework for understanding art stands in contrast to a metaphysics that posits a sensible world of experience and a supersensible world of forms or essences, in which art – even non-representational and conceptual art, in some cases – exists as a mimetic go-between. De Beistegui suggests instead that art captures an aspect of reality that is literally there – an excess of the sensible, "the hypersensible", that is typically hidden by our everyday practical ways of interacting with and experiencing reality. Our grasp of these features is metaphorical in that they are shared by things that are usually put in distinct categories, but it is the sensible/supersensible distinction that gives rise to an impoverished notion of metaphor that prompts us to think that what is metaphorical is not literally true. In this richly suggestive and provocative volume, de Beistegui draws on thinkers from Plato and Nietzsche to Merleau-Ponty and Danto, and discusses works by a wide range of artists, including Proust, Holderlin, de Koonig and Chillida, to elaborate his view.