New Books in Philosophy

Uriah KriegelView on AmazonIt'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, such as feelings of pain or visual experiences of seeing red. It's also hotly debated how to explain how both kinds of mental phenomena are part of a purely physical world. The dominant approach in recent decades is to explain the phenomenal in terms of the intentional and the intentional in terms of the physical causal – that is, to explain conscious experience in terms of intentionality and to explain intentionality in terms of causal relations between thinkers and what they are thinking about. In his new book, The Sources of Intentionality (Oxford University Press), Uriah Kriegel, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues for a reversal of this order of explanation. On his view, conscious experience is basic to the explanation of all mental phenomena. In this erudite, stylish and provocative volume, Kriegel weighs the relative virtues of higher-order tracking and adverbial theories of experiential intentionality, and defends an interpretivist account of non-experiential intentionality.

Allen BuchananView on AmazonPopular 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, the lesson is that the attempt to harness technology for the betterment of the world always backfires.  It's no wonder, then, that when it comes to biomedical technologies that promise to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, many people tend to express deep unease or opposition. But once one recognizes that technological enhancement, including biomedical enhancement, is ubiquitous throughout human history (from the technologies involved with cooking and storing food, to medicine and therapy, to even literacy itself), one wonders whether the common concerns are warranted. In Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2011), Allen Buchanan surveys the contemporary enhancement debate, offers a diagnosis of what drives some of the views that he finds untenable, and proposes a nuanced view that fully recognizes the moral risks inherent in the enhancement enterprise.

Peter-Paul VerbeekView on Amazon"Guns don't kill people; people do." That's a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves. In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek, professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and Delft University, The Netherlands, argues persuasively that this traditional view is no longer tenable. Instead, we need to understand the moral role of technology as one of active mediation, and of ourselves as technologically mediated moral agents. Ultrasound, for example, isn't just a matter of peeking into the womb; the fetus becomes a potential patient, the womb becomes an environment for moral decisions, and the parents become responsible for making these newly relevant decisions. In general, if "ought" implies "can", and if what we can do is expanded and conditioned by technology, then the range and nature of moral decisions and actions must also be expanded and conditioned by technology, and the designing of technology itself can be seen explicitly as having an important moral dimension. In Moralizing Technology, Verbeek spells out this new view of the moral relevance of artifacts and some of its implications for moral subjects, technological design, and ethical theory.

John ChristmanView on AmazonIn theorizing justice, equality, freedom, authority, and the like, political philosophers often rely tacitly upon particular conceptions of the self and individual autonomy.  Traditional forms of liberalism seem to assume a conception of the self according to which selves are self-interested rational choosers of their ends who are fundamentally asocial.  Longstanding critiques of liberalism contend that liberalism assumes a flawed conception of the self.  These views hold that once one recognizes the thoroughly social and relational nature of the self, one must reject liberalism as a framework for political theory. In The Politics of Persons; Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves (Cambridge University Press, 2011), John Christman seeks to develop a form of liberalism that can accommodate insights offered by liberalism's critics about the nature of the self.  Christman develops a liberal theory based in a socio-historical view of the self and individual autonomy.

Crawford ElderView on AmazonIt might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really exist. And yet, these familiar objects are actually very strange. For example, we take for granted that very same object can change all of its properties, and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. but how can that be? By analogy, if I swap all the ingredients in a recipe with a bunch of other ingredients, and then change all the steps, would it make sense to say that I've followed the recipe? But if it doesn't make sense, then what should we say about the nature of ordinary objects? Crawford (Tim) Elder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, critically discusses and replies to the alternatives in his new book Familiar Objects and Their Shadows (Cambridge University Press, 2011). There's the ontological relativist, who denies that ordinary objects exist independently of human minds, and the explosivist, who readily agrees there are ordinary objects, but who also thinks there are many extraordinary objects – for example, trout-turkeys, which start out as a trout and then at a later stage in life are turkeys. There's also the exdurantist, who thinks objects are just chains of temporal stages; the causal exclusionist, who claims that ordinary objects don't in fact satisfy our best criteria for existence; the composition skeptic, who says there are (for example) no dogs, just a bunch of atoms arranged dogwise, and, finally the universal mereologist, who thinks any parts compose a sum – including the sum of your dog, your bed and the Eiffel Tower. In his tightly argued book, Professor Elder takes on these opponents of the view that ordinary objects exist much as we think they do and that they, along with their parts, are pretty much all that does exist.

Robert AudiView on AmazonIn a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals.  Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal.  This requires, in part, that liberal democratic governments must seek to govern on the basis of reasons that all citizens could endorse.  However, the freedoms secured by liberal democratic institutions give rise to a plurality of religious and moral doctrines, and thus a morally and religiously diverse citizenry.  Liberal democratic states, then, must try to govern on the basis of noncontroversial principles, and must avoid governing on the basis of contentions moral and religious ideas.  Religious principles are notoriously controversial among liberal democratic citizens; consequently, it is widely thought that a liberal democratic government must not employ controversial religious reasons when deciding policy.  Hence the familiar commitment to the separation of church and state, and the corresponding idea that government must be neutral when it comes to the Big Questions of human life. Yet the idea that politics and religion should be kept separate seems to be a controversial moral idea in its own right.  For many religious believers, faith informs every aspect of their lives, including the political and social aspects.  Hence the claim that their religious commitments are inappropriate sources of guidance in political matters strikes many religious citizens as deeply objectionable, perhaps even a violation of their right to free religious exercise.  A central challenge for liberal democratic political theory, then, is to justify the separation of church and state (or religion and politics) to religious citizens in a way that does not rely upon controversial moral ideas. In Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Audi proposes a novel and forceful account of the proper role of religious conviction in democratic politics.  This account provides the basis for an attractive conception of the separation of church and state, and a compelling vision of civic virtue.

Peter LudlowView on AmazonThe human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops in specific ways in all humans given the appropriate (usually acoustic) inputs. The end result is someone who speaks a natural language – such as English –and has reliable intuitions about what can and cannot correctly be said in that natural language. Peter Ludlow, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, examines a variety of controversial themes related to this model in his new book, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2011). What is the nature of this universal capacity for language, and how is it related to the natural languages that we come to speak? What sort of evidence can intuitions about what we can and can't say provide about the underlying rules for generating meaningful sounds, especially when we have no conscious access to them? Does it make sense to think that this grammar provides normative guidance for our linguistic behavior when we don't know what it is? Ludlow suggests provocative answers to these questions and more in this ground-breaking book.

Fabienne PeterView on AmazonWinston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.  The quip reve als an interesting dimension of democracy: it's hard to beat, but it's also hard to love.  Democracy is hard to love because it sometimes requires us to acquiesce and live by decisions, rules, and laws that we oppose.  In fact, democracy sometimes requires us to accept political outcomes that we take to be demonstrably sub-optimal, mistaken, and even unjust.  In short, when democracy decides, even those in the minority are required to comply.  And those who refuse or fail to comply can be forced into compliance.  This is what we mean when we talk about the legitimacy of democratic governance: democratically-produced collective decisions place a moral claim even on those who disagree, and the democratic state may enforce compliance with such results. But democratic legitimacy is philosophically puzzling.  It seems that the fact that a given outcome gained the support of a majority provides a very weak reason for compliance among those in the minority. Contemporary democratic theorists have thus turned to the idea of public deliberation as a necessary element of democratic legitimacy.  Deliberative democrats hold that voting must be preceded by open processes of public deliberation.  This reason-recognizing element is supposed to explain both the bindingness of democratic outcomes and the permissibility of the use of force to gain compliance. In Democratic Legitimacy (Routledge, 2011), Fabienne Peter explores the philosophical problems associated with democracy and deploys a series of compelling criticisms of standard accounts of legitimacy.  She then develops an original and fascinating version of deliberative democracy, once which combines epistemic and procedural considerations.

Troy JollimoreView on AmazonLove – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go 'round, and all you need is love. But what sort of experience is loving? What more can we say about it that will illuminate the kind of experience it is? In his thought-provoking new book, Love's Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011), Troy Jollimore, Professor of Philosophy at California State University at Chico, argues that love is a matter of vision in that it literally transforms the eyes – it is an emotion that is partly but essentially characterized by the special kind of visual experience that it brings about. This visual-experiential view of love makes love a kind of emotion that is partly responsive to reasons and to the claims of morality. To Jollimore – who is also an award-winning poet – we do love for reasons, that is, because we see that the beloved has certain valuable features. But the rationalism of love seems to conflict with other features it also has. For example, if Brad loves Angelina because she possesses some set of features, then isn't he rationally obligated to love anyone who has those features, and rationally obligated to stop loving her if she loses any or all of those features? If he did either of those things, it would seem that he did not really love Angelina. Love as a visual-experiential phenomenon also raises special epistemic and moral problems. If love's vision makes us blind to the flaws of the beloved, doesn't that violate basic epistemic norms under which we are supposed to seek the truth as best we can? If love's vision is a kind of tunnel vision in which the beloved is the center of our universe, aren't we apt to ignore the legitimate moral claims on us of other persons? Jollimore considers these and other curious aspects of love as he explains his intriguing view in this interview.

Jason BrennanView on AmazonIt is commonly held that citizens in a democratic society have a civic duty to participate in the processes of collective self-government. Often, this duty is held to be satisfied by voting. In fact, the sentiment is commonly expressed that voting is always a good thing for citizens to do, no matter how they vote. Similarly, it is widely held that when citizens neglect to vote they violate a civic duty, no matter how uninformed or misguided their votes would have been. These popular pieties about voting are, at the very least, philosophically suspicious. In voting, citizens perform a collective action that impacts the lives of others for better or worse; voting thus seems to be the kind of act that can be performed well or badly. Indeed, it seems that there should be circumstances under which it would be wrong for some individual to vote. In The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011), Jason Brennan presents a provocative case for thinking that citizens who choose to vote have a duty to vote well. He then argues that voting well is difficult, and concludes that not only is there not a strong duty to vote, but, for many citizens, there is a duty not to vote. Importantly, Brennan takes his view about voting to be fully and enthusiastically democratic.

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not real can cause emotional responses as if they were real? Why do we experience the adrenalin rush and the racing pulse of fear when we know very well that Hannibal Lector is just a character on the screen? How can an aversive experience be aesthetically valuable? How can something that repels be aesthetically attractive? These paradoxes of fiction and aversion arise in spades when it comes to the emotion of disgust. In this podcast, we talk with Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, about her new book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor Korsmeyer discusses the nature of disgust as an emotion, the aesthetic allure of the disgusting, and the kind of aesthetic experience that we get in disgusting art. Do we really feel disgust when we confront this art, or must our disgust be denatured in some way before we can regard the object aesthetically? How can the disgusting also be attractive? What does disgust add to aesthetic experience that other emotional responses don’t? Korsmeyer claims that disgust is more varied than we tend to think, that it has certain features that overcome the problem of fiction and aversion, and that successful works of art that aim to evoke disgust elicit a special kind of aesthetic response, the sublate.

Demographic data show that the United States is a heavily segregated society, especially when it comes to relations among African-Americans and whites.  The de facto segregation that prevails in the US is easily shown to produce grave and systematic disadvantage for African-Americans.  The degree and extent of this segregation is difficult to explain in the morally innocent terms of individual choice and personal responsibility.  Furthermore, the disadvantages that result are not adequately addressed by standing government policies aimed at anti-discrimination and the redistribution of social goods. In The Imperative of Integration (Princeton University Press, 2010), Elizabeth Anderson makes a compelling case for thinking that de facto segregation is a failure of democracy.  And the failure is twofold: first, a de facto segregated society fails African-Americans in denying them full and equal democratic membership; second, de facto segregation fails democracy in that it loses the positive social goods that emerge from the integration of diverse perspectives and experiences.  She presents a rigorous argument for thinking that integration across racial and other social dimensions is a requirement for a democratic society.

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to have a structured format analogous to the structure that sentences have in natural languages. That is, according to Fodor, we must think in a Language of Thought, sometimes also called Mentalese. Classical computationalism has always had its critics – most notably connectionist or neural-network models, which involve a more brain-like computing system consisting just of simple nodes and their connections, without any obvious internal structure at all. But since 1975 Fodor has argued that the computational model couldn't explain key features and kinds of reasoning, like making plans for the future or making decisions quickly. And he has also argued against the idea that neuroscience had anything critical to do with understanding the mind. In short, Fodor himself helped undermine the dominance of the classical computational model that he played such an important role in founding. Professor Susan Schneider, a doctoral student of Fodor's who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, hopes to revitalize the LOT model in her new book, The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction (MIT Press, 2011). Professor Schneider argues that LOT has suffered because it was underdeveloped in critical ways; in this interview, she talks about how the classical computational model can be modified to remain a vital contender in contemporary cognitive science.

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access.  What is the nature of this reliance?  Do testifiers simply provide us with especially compelling evidence?  Should we regard the testimony of others as only so much more local data in our cognitive environment?  Or is there a deeper sense in which much of our knowledge depends on others? In his new book, Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2010), Sanford  Goldberg argues for the striking thesis that in cases of testimonial knowledge, part of our justification in believing another’s testimony resides in the mind/brain of the testifier.  This thesis runs counter to what Goldberg regards as a widespread and insufficiently examined premise at the heart of most views in contemporary epistemology, namely, individualism, which is the view that a believer’s justification never extends outside of the believer’s mind/brain.  Goldberg argues that, over a significant range of cases, a believer’s justification depends upon irreducibly social factors, and thus that an individual’s justification sometimes resides in part in the cognitive processes of others.

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality.