New Books in Philosophy

About 100 years ago, prominent psychologists Stanley Smith Stevens, Edward Tolman and Clark Hull spearheaded the idea of linking psychological concepts, such as “memory”, to specific experimental designs. In Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Uljana Feest offers a rich analysis of this link as a method for making progress in epistemically uncharted scientific territory. Feest, a professor of philosophy at Leibniz University in Germany, considers the conceptual, epistemic, and methodological issues involved when it is not clear what a target of research is like or even whether it exists. She provides an updated interpretation of what operational definitions are and how they function in psychology, and shows how these foundational issues in psychology intersect with philosophical debates about conceptual change, natural kinds, and mechanistic explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression? How are the relatively recent concepts of person, self, and subject implicated in these forms of oppression? And what theorizations are already available within trans communities for thinking through this all?  In Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Talia Mae Bettcher develops a new theory of intimacy and distance to show how structures of appearing—as well as liminal experiences of appearance—can help us understand trans oppression and gender dysphoria in new ways. This new theory of interpersonal spatiality also shows how we can build worlds otherwise, thinking about connections and relations in ways foreclosed by many of the currently dominate accounts of gender and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Between the study of specific languages and the philosophy of language lies what Ryan Nefdt calls a “Goldilocks zone” of theoretical issues related to language. In The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Nefdt introduces and explores the elements in this zone, including different theories of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and differing views of how language evolved, which languages are possible, and what defines language. Nefdt, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, shows where dominant linguistic theories, such as Chomskian syntactic theory and truth-conditional semantics, fit in a generalized framework where a key theoretical dimension is the role of social context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

This book is available open access here.  The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Part of what makes the challenges that collectively are called the “environmental crisis” so difficult is that the vocabulary we deploy in thinking and discussing the issues emerged under social conditions that are far removed from our present. The familiar idiom of nation states, borders, jurisdiction, and so on seems inadequate for addressing a crisis that concerns global conditions. It's plausible to think that a cogent response to the environmental crisis will require a reconstruction of the conceptual tools of social and political theory. In his new book, Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis (Routledge 2024), Omar Dahbour develops new understandings of the concepts of sovereignty, territory, peoplehood, and self-determination, all with a view toward building a case for the principle according to which peoples have a right to protect and maintain their natural environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025), William Paris uses the tools of critical theory to draw out the utopian interventions in the works of W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs. Arguing that utopian thinking gives us normative purchase on the problems of our own time, Paris shows not that these historical figures can tell us how or to what end we navigate our current crises. Rather, their insights and failures help us denaturalize our mode of life and develop self-emancipatory practices to realize what is not yet possible under the current conditions of injustice in which we have come to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experience – is a radical position in philosophy of mind. David Pitt is one of its foremost proponents.  In The Quality of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pitt provides an extended defense of the position and its implications: if thinking is a kind of experience, then what about unconscious thought, or the idea that explaining thought must rely essentially and primarily on introspection? Pitt, who is a professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, also considers what the sui generis phenomenology of thought might be and explains how thought contents are determined purely internally, challenging today's dominant views of content determination and the possibility of explaining thought content using naturalistic, non-introspection-based methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

This book is free to download here.  Science depends essentially on inductive inferences – inferences that go beyond the evidence on which they are based. But inductive inferences have historically been modeled on deductive inferences, which are valid if and only if they satisfy a valid argument form.  In The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference (BSPS Open/University of Calgary Press), John Norton expands his defense of what he calls the material theory of induction: what makes an induction good is not its conforming to a universal rule, like deduction, but instead by its being warranted by true background facts in a particular domain. Norton – Distinguished Professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh -- argues that while these facts are themselves in turn supported by inductive inferences, the resulting network of inductive support does not suffer from vicious circularity, is not a form of coherentist epistemology, and dissolves the infamous problem of induction articulated most clearly by Hume. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Various kind of philosophical considerations have been offered in favor of democracy. By some accounts, democracy realizes some intrinsic value, such as equality or collective autonomy. According to other views, democracy's value is more instrumental: it tends to produce or promote certain social goods like stability, prosperity, and peace. However, a longstanding alternative tradition locates democracy's value in its capacity to make social and moral progress. Here, the idea isn't so much that democracy produces an already-identified social good, but rather that democracy fosters a kind of social and moral discovery. In Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress (Oxford UP, 2024), Michael Fuerstein draws on normative and empirical considerations in proposing a systematic account of democracy's capacity to foster progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones?  In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), Ege Selin Islekel creates a South-South dialogue, connecting practices of forced disappearance in Latin America with those in Turkey and the movements of resistance developed by the searchers and remnants. By analyzing methods of power that target death and the afterlives of the dead, Islekel shows that the world is, but need not be, organized by such practices. She shows how people mobilize resistance within the death worlds of necrosovereignty, inventing possibilities from the very stuff of nightmares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

This interview is an exception to our “single author monographs” rule, because the edited collection that is its topic is an intellectual achievement worth making an exception for in over 12 years of New Books in Philosophy podcasts. Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide: Volume I and Volume II (Routledge, 2024) is a two-volume compendium of 62 chapters on emotion theory written by 101 leading theorists from philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, and other fields, all grappling with the question: What is an emotion? Editor Andrea Scarantino, who is a professor of philosophy at George State University, has compiled a synoptic and thematically organized collection that covers the history of emotion theory, the main contemporary theories of emotions, individual chapters on 35 distinct emotions, and more. The volumes bring together theorists from distinct disciplines that don't normally engage with each others' work, and provide readers with a one-stop-shop for clearly written introductions to the current states of play in emotion research. Andrea Scarantino is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, where he has taught since 2005. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Elections loom large in our everyday understanding of democracy. Yet we also acknowledge that our familiar electoral apparatus is questionable from a democratic point of view. Very few citizens have access to the kinds of resources that could enable them to stand for election; consequently, political candidates (thus officeholders) tend to come from elite social backgrounds. Moreover, elections involve campaigns, and campaigns almost always deploy various persuasion techniques, many of which are deceptive, manipulative, and downright toxic. Once elected, officials begin seeking re-election, which means that they must devote a great deal of attention to potential donors to their re-election campaigns. And on it goes. If by “democracy” one means “rule by the people,” it's difficult to see how contemporary electoral practices empower us. Notably, our fixation with elections as the sine qua non of democracy is relatively recent. Aristotle claimed that elections are fundamentally oligarchic, and that lotteries were a truly democratic way of filling public offices. In Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections (Oxford University Press, 2024), Alex Guerrero proposes a non-electoral version of democracy that relies on “single issue legislatures” composed of citizens chosen by lot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a profoundly antidemocratic stance. Drawing on extensive research about polarization and partisanship, Talisse argues that certain core democratic capacities can be cultivated only at a distance from the political fray. If we are to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, we must occasionally step away from our allies and opponents alike. We can perform this self-work only in secluded settings where we can engage in civic reflection that is not prepackaged in the idiom of our political divides, allowing us to contemplate political circumstances that are not our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Ware shows how their responses to Indian thought illuminates our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza. He concludes with two chapters on a range of Indian scholars from Swami Vivekananda to K. C. Bhattacharyya, exploring how their work engages with this history of European readings, grappling with themes of freedom, morality, and devotion in yoga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It is not uncommon to encounter people who think and talk about the world so differently from the way you do that it's not really possible to put yourself in their shoes. But such systems of representing the world are not truly alien – they still involve terms that pick out objects, properties, and other elements found in familiar languages and metaphysical theories.  In Alien Structure: Language and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2024)), Matti Eklund considers whether there are ways of representing the world that are completely alien in both linguistic and metaphysical structure, and which may capture reality better (on an ontological realist view) or which might show the limits to “anything goes” (on an ontological relativist view). Eklund, who is professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, defends the value of considering these possibilities and links his discussion to conceptual engineering, philosophy of quantum mechanics, and other contemporary philosophical debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Does Marx have a coherent ethical vision? How does that square with his sometimes-scathing dismissal of morality? What does his critique of capital have to do with ethics? Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class? What is the normative importance of that claim?  In Marx's Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press, 2024), Vanessa Wills provides a careful reconstruction of Marx's understanding of human nature and the possibility of creating a world best suited to our flourishing. Working from Marx's earliest texts through his last, Wills shows not only how Marx builds his understanding from material conditions in their historical specificity, but also how doing so can help guide efforts to change the world in ways that support individual growth, self-expression, and development as a universally shared project. Wills consistently argues against philosophical projects that try to salvage Marx's valuable insights stripped of his method. Wills shows that the method by which Marx sought to understand the world and human nature as a force within it is integral to understanding his vision for what ought to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Land is Our Community: Aldo Leopold's Environmental Ethic for the New Millenium (University of Chicago Press), Roberta Millstein aims to set the record straight. Millstein, who is professor emerit of philosophy at the University of California – Davis, offers interpretations of Leopold's key concepts of the “land community” based in complex webs of causal interactions and “land health” as an ability of the land community to renew itself over time. She provides a comprehensive overview of Leopold's prescient ideas regarding the expansion of humanity's scope of moral concern to the land communities to which we belong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people's collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents. Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And, moreover, the idea that modern elections reveal or express such a will remains dubious. Accordingly, a good deal of democratic theory aims to fill in the missing details regarding the collective will and its representation. In The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford University Press 2024), Samuel Bagg takes a different tack by proposing a vision of democracy where the central aim is to protect public power from capture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil and afterlife, as well as religious identity, beliefs, practices, and diversity. Contributions vary in methodology; some focus on empirical data and modern culture, while others engage with philosophical texts. Essays focus on a range of religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous practices. Despite this variety, the volume's editors present the collection as having a kind of unity, both in the specificity of how Southeast Asia "appropriates" religions and the philosophical nature of the essays included. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly, this is someone who has been selected by an official process to hold a political office where he or she is tasked with promoting, advocating, and speaking for a constituency. However, we are also familiar with informal representatives: those who speak for a constituency but are not appointed by formal processes. Once again, the idea of an informal political representative is probably familiar: rock stars and other celebrities commonly claim to “speak for” others with respect to distinctively political matters, and they are understood by the public to (informally) represent a constituency. Of course, there are lots of ways in which informal political representation can go wrong. Surprisingly, the topic has not been thoroughly theorized. Until now. In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press 2024), Wendy Salkin develops an intricate framework for thinking about informal political representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its considerations of this question, supporting domination and oppression.  In Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2022), Havis brings our focus to theoretically rich practices of African diasporic communities. Offering critical insight into how philosophy has been narrowed, Havis also offers a guide to interpreting the world otherwise, engaging stories, novels, the blues, jazz, work songs, naming and self-naming, and more. Havis does Black Vernacular Philosophy in conversation with other doers as she shows us the urgent need for such work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It was an astounding discovery in the early 1980's that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across the animal kingdom, whether the result was a flatworm, an octopus, a mouse, or a human. This discovery of the conservation of a key developmental mechanism across phyla and vast stretches of evolutionary time helped launch the interdisciplinary field of evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo-Devo.  In Evolution and Development: Conceptual issues (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Alan Love explains and explores Evo-Devo and the philosophical problems that arise in its pursuit. Love, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, considers such issues as the type of scientific unity that arises from focusing on problem agendas rather than theory, the problem of determining when variation in traits gives rise to a novel trait, and how the identity of features at various levels of biological organization can be explained by particular causal mechanisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there's plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy, there is also an increasing reliance on ideas like misinformation, bias, expertise, and propaganda. These latter notions belong, at least in part, to epistemology – the area of philosophy that deals with issues concerning knowledge, rationality, evidence, and belief. Relatively recently, the subfield of political epistemology has emerged. Political epistemologists explore philosophical issues of political belief, political expertise, political information and so on. But they also are concerned to examine the ways in which political arrangements can go well or badly, depending on the character of the epistemic practices that prevail in society. Political epistemology is — by philosophy's standards – a new subfield. Perhaps it is no more than two decades old. Yet the field is organized around a few disputes. In Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge 2024), Oliver Traldi surveys the terrain, often leading the reader to the conclusion that things are more complicated than they might seem. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings.  Stephen Harris's Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is a study of the Guide. It articulates Śāntideva's moral psychology and virtue theory in chapter-length treatments of four central virtues: generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom. According to Harris, Śāntideva thinks these virtues benefit human persons, and thus the radically altruistic bodhisattva path is also a self-interested one. Harris's book also explores how this ethical project coheres with the emptiness of all things, the famous Madhyamaka denial of intrinsic nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.  In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In political philosophy, “liberalism” is not the name of a particular social platform. Rather, it refers to a framework for thinking about politics. It is the way of thinking according to which the state, its laws, and its institutions all stand in need of justification, and that the justification of the state must be addressed to those who live within its territory. In this way, liberalism as a philosophical stance affirms the moral equality of persons and prioritizes the liberty of each, “taken one by one,” as it were. The idea of liberalism as a way of life thus may seem curious. According to many traditional liberal thinkers, liberalism is distinguished from other approaches by the denial that it is a “way of life.” On these views, a liberal political order establishes the conditions under which each individual can “seek their own good in their own way,” as John Stuart Mill put it. In Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press 2024), Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism currently informs our cultural sensibilities. What's more, he argues that liberalism is a worthwhile way of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together?  In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp contrast, today's artificial neural networks – deep learning – are able to learn from experience, and perform at human-like levels of perceptual categorization, language production, and other cognitive abilities at h. This difference has been portrayed as roughly parallel to the philosophical divide between rationalists or nativists on the one hand, and empiricists on the other.  In From Deep Learning to Rational Machines (Oxford UP, 2024), Cameron Buckner lays out a program for future AI development based on discussions of the human mind by such figures as David Hume, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Sophie de Grouchy, among others. Buckner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, offers a conceptual framework that occupies a middle ground between the extremes of 'blank slate' empiricism and innate domain specific faculty psychology, and defends the claim that neural network modelers have found, at least in some cases, a sweet spot of abstraction from the messy details of biological cognition so as to capture the relevant similarities in their artificial networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen's capacity to function as a full member of society. What's more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification. In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country's legacy of unjust housing policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom's Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang's Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo's conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo's “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo's hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience.  In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays out the seemingly irreconciliable theoretical commitments of ecological psychology and neuroscience, and then defends a framework for reconciling them: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). According to Favela, who is an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at the University of Central Florida, complexity science provides the conceptual tools that can help integrate these frameworks, such as by articulating the key notion of affordances in ecological psychology as a kind of dimensional reduction in complexity science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

When we think of censorship, our minds might turn to state agencies exercising power to silence dissent. However, contemporary concerns about censorship arise in contexts where non-state actors suppress expression and communication. There are subtle and not-so-subtle forms of interference that come from social groups, employers, media corporations, and even search engines. Should these “new” forms of censorship alarm us? Should we assess them in ways that mirror our typical views about state-enacted censorship? If not, how should we think about non-state modes of censorship? In Private Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2024), JP Messina takes up these broad questions. He examines a range of emerging sites of non-state censorship – what he calls “private” censorship – and sorts through the normative, political, and legal issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How can we understand the changing power of race and gender to shape our reality? How shared is reality? Can narratives of experience help us develop these analyses? What role does embodiment play in shaping experience? In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference (Lexington Books, 2024), Emily S. Lee uses the tools of critical phenomenology to deeply engage with the theoretical work of women of color to approach these questions. Through reconstructing phenomenological approaches, particularly as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee helps us see past a naturalization of the identity group “women of color” to understand more deeply the coalitional struggle its articulation involves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given current scientific theory. He distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously – like being a brain in a vat – from those that are just plausible enough to deserve playful, yet motivated, consideration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara's analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara's commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara's theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Such pessimists about aesthetic testimony hold that facts about aesthetic properties – such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy, or Picasso's Guernica being anti-war – can't be transmitted by testimony, and can only be learned through first-person experience.  In Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach (Oxford UP, 2022), Jon Robson argues that aesthetic testimony should be treated on a par with testimony in other domains; our deference to others in aesthetic matters is about the same as it is in other areas of knowledge. Robson, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, defends a view called contextualist optimism, in which, just as with testimony in other domains, whether we obtain aesthetic knowledge depends on the context in which aesthetic judgments are transmitted. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In our day-to-day lives, we are subject to normative requirements, obligations, and expectations that originate in the social roles we occupy. For example, professors ought to pursue the truth, while parents ought to be supportive of their children. What's interesting is that these role-specific requirements seem to befall us. We do not choose them. This raises the puzzle of what accounts for their normativity. In Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms (Oxford University Press 2023), Charlotte Witt proposes a novel and intriguing conception of the nature of social norms and the source of their normativity. The centerpiece of her account is the idea that we must look to various examples of artisanal practices, dispositions, and techniques to understand social norms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Swearing can be a powerful communicative act, for good or ill. The same word can incite violence or increase intimacy. How is swearing so multivalent in its power? Is it just all those harsh “c” and “k” sounds? Does swearing take its power from taboo meaning? Why is swearing sometimes so funny? In For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (Oxford University Press, 2023), Rebecca Roache, host of the podcast The Academic Imperfectionist, offers us rich insights into the complex importance of swearing to help us understand who gets judged too harshly for doing it, why it's important to be able to offend with swearing, why we might need to advocate for some swear words, and so much more. Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a species shared. Individuals belonged to a species by possessing this essence. Biologists and philosophers of biology today are either not essentialists at all, or if they are think there are essences they are relational, historical properties.  In his provocative book Biological Essentialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Devitt argues for a new form of biological essentialism in which intrinsic essences, probably largely genetic properties, are part of what tie species together and that the actual explanatory practices of biologists commit them to this view. Devitt, who is distinguished professor of philosophy, emeritus, at CUNY Graduate Center, responds to many philosophers critical of his position, and applies his essentialism to debates about race realism and anti-realism. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory. Among these are views that have relied on markets as mechanisms for sharing and distributing information. But there are hazards to market-based thinking about democracy. In Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Lisa Herzog explores three conceptually distinct sites where democracy interfaces with epistemology: markets, expert communities, and public deliberation. The result is an integrated political epistemology for democracy. Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A proponent of the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Candrakīrti wrote several works, one of which, the Madhamakāvatāra, strongly influenced later Tibetan understandings of Madhyamaka.  This work is the subject of Jan Westerhoff's Candrakīrti's Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2024), part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. His book situates Candarkīrti and his text within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and helps philosophical readers appreciate the text's main arguments and ideas. Chief among these is a commitment to the emptiness of all phenomena, especially but not only selves, which is the subject of the lengthy sixth chapter—analyzing what it means for things to lack any substantial existence and criticizing opposing positions. Candrakīrti also takes up topics in metaphilosophy (do critical arguments commit us to positive claims?), philosophy of mind (do enlightened beings have experience at all?), and semantics and logic (what is the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, and can we express the latter in language?). Westerhoff's guide aims to help readers unfamiliar with Sanskrit or Tibetan navigate these ideas, pointing them to further scholarly and philosophical resources along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Krista Thomason flips the script on popular ways of dealing with our emotions, including neo-Stoicism, mindfulness, and even the prosperity gospel. She makes the case that we should get rid of the double standard we have towards "good" and "bad" emotions, and that we should not aim to be emotional saints. Instead, because "bad" emotions are an essential part of our attachments to our selves, they help us discover what we care about. Thomason, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, guides the reader through philosophical traditions regarding the relation of emotion to reason and the various approaches thinkers have come up with to deal with our "bad" emotions. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy