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

Evil is among our everyday moral concepts. It is common to hear politicians and others condemn certain acts, purposes, people, or even populations as evil. But what does it mean to say that something is evil? Is the evil simply the exceedingly wrong? Is evil rather a distinctive kind of wrongness? Is it a kind of wrongness at all? Are acts evil regardless of the motives of those who commit them, or are people the things that are fundamentally evil (or not)?It takes only a few simple questions to complicate our familiar conception of evil. That’s partly the point of Luke Russell’s fascinating book, Being Evil: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford UP, 2020). In it, he takes the reader through a careful analysis of the concept of evil. Along the way, he develops and defends his own conception of what evil is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The first book in a new series, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury Academic 2021), co-authored by Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach and Leah Kalmanson, introduces readers to a diverse range of world philosophies. It both guides readers through philosophical questions and reflects on how the discipline of philosophy has come to define its boundaries, thus deciding which questions are worth asking, within which contexts, and by which methods. The book takes up a range of philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, African, Islamicate, and Maori ideas about knowledge and personhood. The book moves between first- and second- order philosophical reflection, both thinking about the context in which we do philosophy and doing philosophy with these traditions, making pedagogical applications along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How do we think about situations and things do not exist but might, engage in pretense and fiction, and create new works of art? These are central cases in which we’re using our imaginations, but what is imagination, and how should it be explained? In Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Langland-Hassan distinguishes using mental imagery to think about things and thinking about imaginary things, and proceeds to give a reductive account of both. On his view, imagining isn’t a sui generis mental state, as the received view holds. Instead, it can be reduced to more basic states, in particular belief, desire, and intention. Langland-Hassan, who is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, uses his account to explain the central cases of imagination, defends his view against objections, and considers how recent advances in Deep Learning might help explain the creative process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory? Must social justice be a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional theory? Patricia Hills Collins explores these questions, and many more, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019). Engaging a wide range of thinkers, activists, and traditions, including Classical American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and Ida B. Well-Barnett, Collins helps us to reconsider how we think of intersectionality’s history in order to shape its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was considered the science of the self/non-self distinction: the immune system comprised the self’s defenses against invading non-self pathogens, and was a sophisticated system possessed only by vertebrates. In Philosophy of Immunology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Thomas Pradeu explains why these traditional conceptions have been upended over the past 20 years or so. It is now accepted that even single celled organisms have immune systems and that immune systems are also active in many biological activities, including regulation of foreign entities that are not part of the body but are not pathogens either, such as the gut microbiome. Pradeu, who is senior researcher at CNRS and University of Bordeau, defends his view of the individual as an immunologically unified chimera, and speculates about the implications for our understanding of cognition and psychiatric illness in the light of new discoveries of overlap between the immune and nervous systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A core duty of government is keeping those it governs safe. However, in modern democratic states, government is structured by a Constitution, which establishes constraints and checks on the power of any one office. But emergencies – from natural disasters to terrorist attacks – often call for a swift response that presses against those constraints and checks. In the United States, the President has claimed the authority to do what’s necessary to secure and protect the American people. Can such claims be squared with a commitment to the Constitution?In Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism (Yale 2021), Thomas Crocker argues for a conception of American constitutionalism that can address the need for government to respond to emergencies without losing its normative bearings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What is the relationship between time and sexual difference? Are the categories of linearity and circularity that have so dominated conceptions of time sufficient for the emancipatory aims of feminist theory and praxis? In Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray (SUNY Press, 2019), Fanny Söderbäck engages the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray to argue that neither linear nor circular models of time make change possible. Only through returning to and revitalizing the past can we enliven the present in ways that make a new future possible. Time and sexual difference, she argues, must be thought together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy