In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the history of extraterritoriality and the treaty port system in nineteenth century societies. Eschewing the kinds of teleological narratives that privilege current nation states, Par Cassel locates late Qing, Tokugawa, and Meiji debates in a deep history of legal pluralism, notions of “foreign” identity, and inter-ethnic relations. Cassel uses an impressive range of press accounts, legal texts, and other sources to unfold the ways that the very different trajectories of extraterritoriality in China and Japan had very different consequences for the two countries. Cassel’s book ranges across some fascinating case studies from the histories of opium, counterfeiting, and the police. In addition to being required reading for anyone working in the history of modern China or Japan, Grounds of Judgment is also of special note to readers interested in the ways that language, dialect, and translation have shaped modern history, legal reform, and international relations. Enjoy!

Do social values belong in the sciences? Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models as well as offering a capsule history of the philosophy of science as a professional discipline. The book is a profoundly transdisciplinary work even as it maintains a very careful focus on the philosophy of science as a discipline. Kourany’s archive includes the work of philosophers of science, feminist theorists, sociologists, historians, and many others, with the reader consistently and sometimes explicitly invited into the dialogue. Kourany suggests a program that emerges from previous and contemporary attempts to create a more socially-engaged philosophy of science, guides us through some major potential challenges to the political approach that she advocates, and provides concrete suggestions for integrating philosophers into the construction of more thoughtful ethical codes for scientific practice. It is an engaging, thoughtful, and teachable text advocating a space of philosophers as public intellectuals, and we had a very enjoyable and spirited conversation about it. Enjoy!  

It 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.

When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge. This work was dense, long, and I must confess, wound up mostly unread. So when I came across Dr. Paul Gutjahr‘s Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011), I knew I had to find out why someone would write a biography about this man. It turns out there is much more to Hodge than I imagined. Dr. Gutjahr sets Charles Hodge in context and takes us through all of his 80 years letting us see into his family, friendships and battles. He concludes showing how Hodge is still influencing Christianity in America today.

David Karpf is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (Oxford University Press 2012) and an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. His book is timely, well-researched, and insightful. He explores the adoption of Internet technologies by advocacy groups in the early 2000s, specifically MoveOn, DailyKos, and Democracy for America. Karpf argues that these technologies are transformative and disruptive, permitting the establishment of whole new types of advocacy group based on low-cost, high-speed virtual mobilization and organizing. Readers from both the academic and professional political world would benefit from reading this book. Its conclusions suggest a radical change in the population of interest groups as we know it.

According 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.

How do ideologies shape foreign policy? That is question Dr. Mark Haas examines in his new book The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012). The book analyzes how ideologies shape the perceptions and actions of governments, and specifically the impact this has on relations between the US and the Middle East. Dr. Haas examines two key variables, ideological distance and ideological polarity, using case studies on the Syrian-Iranian alliance, Iran’s ideological factions in the past decade, Turkey’s post-cold war foreign policies, and the US-Saudi relationship. The book not only analyzes the ways in which ideologies impact foreign policy, but also tries to provide ways for improving foreign policy decisions in the future by employing strategies that use ideological analysis.

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see? This question informs a long history of debates over scientific realism and the extent to which we trust what contemporary and future scientific theories tell us about unobservable phenomena. Using the history of science as an evidentiary archive, Kyle Stanford explores this set of problems in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback, 2010). He suggests that we reframe the problem as one of “unconceived alternatives.” Put briefly, if we look at the history of scientific inquiry we’ll see that scientists have repeatedly occupied an epistemic position from which they could conceive of only a fraction of the theories that would have been amply supported by existing evidence. Stanford develops this idea and demonstrates its significance via a series of case studies from the early history of theorizing about generation and inheritance, moving from Darwin’s “mad dream” to Galton’s rabbit transfusion experiments and Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm. Over the course of our conversation we talked, among other things, about the ways that a project like this can contribute to efforts to create a broader trans-disciplinary dialogue across the vast terrain of STS. Enjoy!

The 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.

Justice 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.