New Books in Philosophy

View on AmazonPlato 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.  Democracy, such views claim, is simply a matter of representing citizens' preferences in politics, or rather a matter of giving everyone equal input into the decision making process.  But even these minimal conceptions of democracy often want to distinguish between "raw" and "enlightened" preferences, thereby smuggling in considerations regarding the wisdom or rationality of democratic citizens.  More recent democratic theories have embraced the epistemic aspect of democratic politics, and have tried to show, contra Plato, that citizens are not too unwise for self-government.  Some hold that democracy in fact requires very little wisdom, and that citizens generally measure up to democracy's requirements.  Others think that democracy's epistemic demands are significant, but hold nonetheless that the collective judgment of democracy citizens makes the grade.  Democracy, it seems, is intricately entwined with epistemology. In his new book Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press), Jamie Kelly brings empirical results concerning human epistemic abilities to bear on the current field of democracy theory.  He argues that our susceptibility to framing effects greatly complicates the story democratic theorists must tell about collective self-government and individual rationality.  Kelly thereby provides a much-needed empirical check on the claims democratic theorists make–implicitly or explicitly– about the epistemic powers of citizens.

Jill GordonView on AmazonIt'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, which include Symposium, Phaedrus and Alcibiades I, where themes of love and friendship are explicitly treated, and then the rest, which deal with such non-erotic themes as language and knowledge and ontology. Jill Gordon,  Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy at Colby College, argues that this second division deeply misinterprets the role of eros in the Platonic corpus. In her new book, Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge University Press 2012), she argues that paradigmatically non-erotic dialogues, such as Theaetetus, Parmenides and Phaedo, are in fact deeply erotic, and that the theme of eros unifies the corpus rather than divides it. For example, the Socratic dialectic, or elenchus, is a give-and-take that is erotic in nature, and doing philosophy itself is an erotic endeavor akin to naked exercise in the gymnasium. Her argument begins with a close reading of Timaeus, Plato's creation myth, and the role of eros in the immortal human soul, and comes full circle with a reading of Phaedo in which Socrates' growing rigidity as the hemlock takes hold is an erotic pun.

Nicole HassounView on AmazonCitizens 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 impoverished.  But there's a question regarding the nature and extent of these obligations.  Some hold that well-off societies and their citizens own substantial duties of humanitarian assistance to the global poor.  Others claim that our duties are stronger than this; they claim that our duties to the global poor are a matter of justice. In her new book, Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Nicole Hassoun proposes a new kind of argument for what she calls "serious moral duties to the global poor."  She claims that in our globalized world, people all over the globe are subject to the coercive power of international institutions.  She then argues that these coercive institutions are legitimate only if they can win the consent of those subject to them.  From this, she concludes that international institutions owe to the global poor whatever is required in order to enable them to exercise a kind of minimal autonomy; and this autonomy requires access to food, shelter, water, and education.  Hassoun's argument, then, is that familiar minimal requirements for legitimate coercion entail more extensive positive duties to the global poor.

Kristin AndrewsView on AmazonThe 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 solve mysterious crimes. But folk psychology is not restricted to genius detectives. We all use it: to predict what a friend will feel when we cancel a date, to explain why a child in a playground is crying, to deceive someone else by saying less than the whole story. Its very ubiquity explains why it is called folk psychology. But how in fact does folk psychology work? On standard views in philosophy and psychology, folk psychology just is the practice of ascribing or attributing beliefs and desires to people for explaining and predicting their behavior. A folk psychologist is someone who has this "theory of mind". In her new book,  Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology (MIT Press, 2012), Kristin Andrews, associate professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, argues that the standard view is far too narrow a construal of what's going on. It leaves out a wide variety of other mechanisms we use to understand the mental lives of others, and a wide variety of other reasons we have for engaging in this social competence. Moreover, what's necessary to be a folk psychologist is not a sophisticated metacognitive ability for ascribing beliefs, but an ability to sort the world into agents and non-agents – an ability that greatly expands the class of creatures that can be folk psychologists. Andrews draws on empirical work in psychology and ethology, including her own field work observing wild primates, to critique the standard view and ground her alternative pluralistic view.

Paul WeithmanView on AmazonIt 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 books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993).  The most common account of Rawls's intellectual trajectory has it that the later Rawls came to regard the project of A Theory of Justice as deeply flawed.  That is, Political Liberalism is often read as an attempt to dial back or even renounce the project of A Theory of Justice. In fact, Political Liberalism is commonly taken to represent a drastic lowering of the ambitions for political philosophy as such. In his book, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls's Political Turn (Oxford University Press, 2010), Paul Weithman meticulously develops and defends a non-standard account of Rawls's turn from the view proposed in A Theory of Justice to that of Political Liberalism.  According to Weithman, both works are centrally focused on the very same problem, namely, how a stably just society is possible among creatures like us.  Weithman argues that Rawls's "turn" involves not a change of topic, or a lowering of ambition, but a change in how Rawls understood the nature of social stability.  If Weithman is correct, the standard understanding of Rawls's philosophy must change significantly.  Perhaps more importantly, if Weithman is right, many of the most common criticisms of Rawls more obviously miss their mark.

Lee BraverView on AmazonLudwig 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 and Edmund Husserl, respectively – and were considered their philosophical heirs; and both ended up critiquing their mentors and thereby influencing the direction of thought in both the Analytic and Continental traditions. In Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (MIT Press, 2012), Lee Braver, associate professor of philosophy at Hiram College attempts to build what he calls a "load-bearing bridge" between these often polarized traditions. He argues that both thinkers have similar arguments for similar conclusions on similar fundamental issues. Both blame the disengaged contemplation of traditional philosophy for confusion about the nature of language, thought and ontology, and that attention to normal, ongoing human activity in context presents alternative fundamental insights into their nature. The groundless grounds of the title is the idea that finite human nature gives us everything we need to understand meaning, mind and being, and that to insist that this ground requires justification itself betrays confusion.

Anthony LadenView on AmazonAccording 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, in order to figure out what to believe or decide what to think.  Reasoning in this sense has as its objective its own termination–we reason in order to reach a conclusion; and once a conclusion is reached, reasoning is no longer needed. In his new book, Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012), Professor Anthony Simon Laden challenges this common view.  He contends that the standard picture of reasoning is insufficiently attentive to the respects in which reasoning is an activity we engage in together and not only for the purpose of demonstrating the correctness of statements, but in order to structure, shape, change, and construct relations with others.  On the "social picture" of reasoning that Laden develops, reasoning is a matter of issuing invitations to others to share an evolving and public space of reasons.  In developing this new picture, Laden proposes fully social conceptions of the norms and purposes of reasoning.  What emerges is a deeply compelling picture of the richness of rational human interaction.

Helen StewardView on AmazonThe 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 conditions of the universe and the laws governing its unfolding since then. A contemporary variant goes something like this: we're predetermined to do what we do because our minds arise from brain activity and brain activity is just a special kind of physical activity. In A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford, 2012), Helen Steward attempts to undermine the fundamentals of this mechanistic view with an alternative that she calls Agency Incompatibilism. On Steward's view, the concept of agency is very close to that of animacy, and includes the concept of being able to settle what happens, when and how with one's body. Since settling matters implies that they are not determined, agency is incompatible with determinism, and since there are agents, determinism must be false. That is, it is not up to physics to tell us whether determinism is true. Moreover, she denies that the causal efficacy nature of agency should be explicated in terms of events going on inside agents. With this subtly argued book, Steward assumes a leading role in a new non-mechanistic movement in the metaphysics of mind and mental causation.

Kok-Chor TanView on AmazonJustice 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 impact of luck on individuals' lives. This is an extremely simplified articulation of a popular–and in certain philosophical circles infamous–conception of justice called luck egalitarianism. As a kind of egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires something to be distributed equally, and various versions of the doctrine disagree about what this is. The luck in luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires that individuals not be advantaged (or disadvantaged) for features of their lives that have simply befallen them as a matter of good (or bad) luck; rather, social advantage (and disadvantage) should be tied to an individual's choices. This basic principle of luck egalitarianism seems intuitive. The difficulty lies in building a conception of social justice upon it. Three pressing details confronting the luck egalitarian are the site, ground, and scope of egalitarian justice. These correspond, roughly to the following three questions: (1) to what do egalitarian principles of justice apply?; (2) Why does equality matter?; and (3) To whom are egalitarian duties of justice owed? In his new book, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kok-Chor Tan articulates and defends an original conception of luck egalitarianism according to which (1) egalitarian principles of justice apply to social institutions rather than to the whole of social life; (2) equality matters because there is a fundamental moral distinction between luck and choice; and (3) duties of justice are not bounded by state borders, but are owed globally. In developing his view, Tan responds to luck egalitarianism's critics and launches compelling critiques of its competitors. The book hence provides the reader with both a detailed roadmap of the current debates over egalitarianism and a state-of-the-art formulation of a distinctive egalitarian conception of justice.

Eric MarcusView on AmazonWe 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 was because I believed that the deceased deserved respect. So much is part of what is sometimes called the space of reasons and reason-giving – a space that people occupy but objects like apples don't. We can explain an apple's falling because the wind blew strongly, but the explanation doesn't require us to ascribe any reasons to the apple. Acting for reasons is reserved for creatures with minds. But what is the difference in the "because" when we say that I took off my hat because I was paying my respects and that the apple fell because the wind blew? How is this difference to be explained? Eric Marcus, associate professor of philosophy at Auburn University, takes on this complex question in his book Rational Causation (Harvard University Press, 2012). The orthodox answer assimilates rational causation to the same causal picture we use for apples. Marcus challenges the physicalistic framework in which this answer is embedded, and argues for a position that is neither reductive nor dualistic. On his view, rational causation is a kind of difference-making that involves the exercise of special rational abilities. As a result of these abilities, minds make a robust causal difference to what we do and believe that is independent of the way in which minds depend on brains.

Elizabeth BrakeView on AmazonFrom 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, marriage is portrayed as necessary for a healthy and flourishing adult life. And we often see the event of a wedding to have a morally transforming power over the individuals who get married.  But with only a little bit of reflection, our popular conception of the meaning and significance of marriage begins to look problematic.  Is marriage really so different from other kinds of interpersonal relations that it should be accorded such a central place in our popular views about adulthood?  Are those who happen to never fall in love and so never get married really doomed to an inferior or morally impoverished kind of life?  And when one considers the significant social and legal benefits, rights, and privileges that accrue to individuals in virtue of their being married the standard picture seems all the more objectionable.  These thoughts have led some to conclude that marriage should be disestablished as a civic status. In Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), Elizabeth Brake criticizes the popular view of marriage as intrinsically dyadic, heterosexual, and focused on romantic love and sexual exclusivity.  She also rejects the idea that marriage is a unique kind of moral relation, one that differs in kind from friendships and other kinds of caring relationships.  Brake also challenges the current political and legal significance that currently attaches to marriage. Yet she also rejects marriage disestablishment; employing arguments drawing from John Rawls's later work, Brake opts instead for a conception of minimal marriage in which marriage is conceived as a relation between two or more people for purposes of mutual care.

Paul ThagardView on AmazonWe'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. But another perspective on them is from the point of view of cognition. For example, how do scientists come up with breakthroughs? What happens when a scientist confronts a new theory that conflicts with an established one? In what ways does her belief system change, and what factors can impede her acceptance of the new theory? In his latest book, The Cognitive Science of Science (MIT Press, 2012), Paul Thagard considers the nature of science from this cognitive scientific perspective. Thagard, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, presents a comprehensive view of such aspects of scientific thinking as the process of discovery and creativity, the nature of change in scientific beliefs, and the role of emotions and values in these processes. He defends an explanatory coherence model of belief revision, proposes a model for explaining resistance to new scientific ideas, and even suggests why so much creative thinking goes on in the shower.

Michael LynchView on AmazonModern 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, we seek out new ways to employ technology in our everyday lives.  These developments depend upon a set of intellectual practices that are commonly associated with the methods of the natural sciences.  We are able to invent and create precisely because we are able to gather evidence and reason competently. But this fascination with technology and science is accompanied by various forms of skepticism about reason itself.  Some hold that reason is a kind of Promethean hubris.  Others claim that what passes for reason is really just rationalization or power.  Still others contend that reason is at best of limited value, and that other, non-rational, sources of cognitive guidance are more authoritative than reason. Michael Lynch's new book, In Praise of Reason (The MIT Press, 2012), launches a compelling and deeply engaging defense of the idea that our cognitive lives are properly managed when they are aimed at believing in accordance with reason.  In making his case for reason, Lynch emphasizes the importance of reason for the maintenance of a democratic society.  In Praise of Reason resides at the intersection of political philosophy and epistemology, and for this reason will be of interest to a wide range of philosophers and non-philosophers alike.

Charlotte WittView on AmazonIs 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 book The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that obviously they'd be different if their gender differed – even though many feminist philosopher friends considered gender essentialism to be false. Thus a philosophical inquiry was born: what is gender essentialism, why might it be true, if it is true, and what consequences does this answer have for ourselves and societies? In this engaging volume, Witt – who is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire – argues that a certain form of gender essentialism is true. Gender is the social role that unifies us as social individuals, an ontological category distinct from both human organisms and persons. By distinguishing social individuals from persons, Witt hopes to promote the idea that the point of feminism is not giving women more choices, but about reconfiguring social roles so that they no longer oppress and exploit women.

Karen StohrView on AmazonWe 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, when to bring a gift to a party, and how to maintain one's privacy. These rules are simply taken for granted, and when we regard them at all, we typically see them merely as instruments for social coordination, ways of keeping out of each other's way.  Yet when others flout the rules–say, when someone cuts a long line that we have been waiting in at the coffee shop–we  we feel not only that cooperation has broken down; we also tend to feel that in cutting the line, the cutter wronged us in some way.  And so it goes for many of the rules pertaining to etiquette and manners, they have moral content. In On Manners (Routledge, 2011), Karen Stohr examines the morally complex world of etiquette.  She maintains that rules of etiquette and manners are expressions of deeper moral principles.  Considering a broad range of kinds of social contexts, Stohr develops a compelling account of the nature and philosophical significance of having good manners.