New Books in Philosophy

Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since the inception of QM about how, exactly, we should understand what it tells us about reality. In The World in the Wave Function (Oxford UP, 2021), Alyssa Ney defends wave function realism, the claim that the basic representation in QM, the wavefunction, corresponds to a field in a high-dimensional space, and that this field and its space is the fundamental reality. Ney, a leading philosopher of physics and metaphysics at the University of California at Davis, defends this controversial view by explaining how the particles of classical mechanics and the ordinary objects of familiar 3D space can plausibly arise from it. Ney makes the complications of QM accessible to non-physicists, and clearly explains the motivations for her view, the opposing positions, and the challenges that face any interpretation of the ontological implications of quantum mechanics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Discussions of the ethics and politics of immigration tend to focus on those seeking entry into a new society. We ask whether a country has the “right to exclude” those who want to relocate within it. We explore the moral implications of more-or-less restrictive immigration policies, often with a view towards the plight of immigrants and refugees.These are of course important questions, but in his new book, Immigration and Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2021) Chandran Kukathas argues that a state’s immigration policies also exert control over its domestic population. He asks whether this exercise of power is justifiable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What can debt reveal to us about coloniality and its undoing? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Rocío Zambrana theorizes the way debt has been used as a technique of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, producing profit from death on the island. With close attention to the material practices of protestors who have fought that destruction of life for the purposes of profit, Zambrana argues that decolonization entails political-economic subversion and transformative interruption of the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that fuel and are sustained by colonization. She shows us how organizing pessimism nourishes hope.Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Mona Simion, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow and author of "Shifty Speech and Independent Thought," delves into the fascinating intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of language. She explores how knowledge claims shift with practical stakes and the tension between epistemic and non-epistemic norms. Simion analyzes confidence in assertions, particularly in high-stakes situations, and emphasizes the unique treatment of moral assertions. Her insights challenge traditional views on evidence and decision-making, offering a fresh perspective on knowledge and assertions.

According to an intuitive view, those who commit crimes are justifiably subject to punishment. Depending on the severity of the wrongdoing constitutive of the crime, punishment can be severe: incarceration, confinement, depravation, and so on. The common thought is that in committing serious crimes, persons render themselves deserving of punishment by the State. Punishment, then, is simply a matter of giving offenders their just deserts. Call this broad view retributivism. What if retributivism’s underlying idea of desert is fundamentally confused? What if persons lack the kind of free will that would make them deserving of punishment in the sense that retributivism requires?This is the central question of Gregg Caruso’s new book, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (Cambridge, 2021). After arguing against the idea that persons can be deserving of punishment in the retributivist’s sense, Caruso develops an alternative approach to criminal behavior that he called the Public-Health Quarantine Model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), not only brings together his wide-ranging research from the past three decades, but brings together Indian philosophers with analytic philosophers in an extended reflection on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language. He takes up these topics under the three broad categories of objects, subjects, and other subjects, investigating where arguments for the existence of ordinary objects might lead us: towards accepting the reality and perceptibility of universals and the existence of immaterial yet embodied selves. Chakrabarti’s arguments engage with well-known analytic thinkers like Russell, Strawson, and Dummett, along with well-known Indian thinkers like Śaṅkara, Nāgārjuna, and Uddyotakara, though always for the purpose of philosophical progress, not mere comparison or historical exegesis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian who developed a systematic view of how we construct and experience culture, widely construed to include mathematics, science, religion, myth, art, politics, ethics and other social endeavors. In Cassirer (Routledge 2021), Samantha Matherne explains how Cassirer updates Kant to develop his critical idealism in the form of a distinction between substance and function – the mind-dependent objects we cognize, and the structure of our minds that these objects depend on. He uses this view in his broad philosophy of symbolic forms, unpacking the way we build up the cultural world around us and our lived experience in that cultural world. Matherne, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University, brings Cassirer’s work to life for those beyond his contemporary influences in the metaphysics of science, the philosophy of art, and the insertion of myth into the politics of fascism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We commonly ascribe beliefs and similar attitudes to groups. For instance, we say that a foreign government believes that members of the press are spies, or that a corporation denies that its product is harmful to the environment. Sometimes, it seems that in such cases, we are simply ascribing to the group the shared beliefs of its members. But there are other cases in which it appears we are referencing an independent subject of the belief or attitude – the government or the corporation, over and above its members. Puzzles abound.In The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford 2021), Jennifer Lackey develops a unified account of group belief, justified group belief, group knowledge, and group assertion. Intriguingly, this account serves ultimately to allow us to make sense of group lies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Is curiosity political? Does it have a philosophical lineage? In Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Perry Zurn shows, consequentially, yes. He further asks: Who can be curious? How? When? To what effect? What happens when we are curious together? Engaged with multiple social movements ranging from the mid-twentieth century to our current time, and thinkers of curiosity from the Ancient world until now, Zurn theorizes the normative and political force of curiosity while providing insight into how it has and can be wielded for transformative collective resistance.Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is one of the most popular philosophical works by sales to the public, while in academic philosophy he is considered somewhat of a philosophical lightweight. In Marcus Aurelius (Routledge, 2020), John Sellars argues that this academic perception mistakes the Meditations as a failed work of theoretical argument, when instead it is a series of spiritual training exercises to condition the Roman emperor’s character in accordance with the Stoic doctrines he learned as a bookish boy. Sellars, who is reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, sees Marcus Aurelius as using his Meditations as an antidote to corrupting pressures of his powerful position and debilitating suffering in the face of adversity in his personal life and in his military campaigns against Germanic tribes. The book accessibly introduces the main Stoic doctrines that form the background of Marcus Aurelius’s writings, and shows how he reviews the day’s events and where he has gone wrong in his responses to them in their light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy