New Books in Philosophy

When asked what democracy is, many of us instantly think of elections, and thus voting. Although we tend to see voting as central to democracy, we also think that voting is optional – a commendable activity that a citizen might choose to do, but one that can be omitted blamelessly. What’s more, political theorists and philosophers tend to regard voting as irrational, reckless, or worse. Some have even suggested that low voter turnout is a signal of the health of a society.In The Duty to Vote (Oxford University Press, 2019), Julia Maskivker argues that voting is an obligation rooted in a Samaritan duty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), Robert Talisse argues that contrary to what many democratic theorists have argued, democracy is something we can do too much of – and that it is in fact being overdone. Talisse, who is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, notes that features of everyday life are overwhelmingly transformed into expressions of political identity, and argues that this transformation undermines democracy itself, since it undermines our capacity for civic friendship, or the capacity to see our political rivals as our equals. His book is a provocative contribution to discussion among political theorists about the problems facing contemporary democracy; from a practical standpoint, he also suggests that a way to counter this situation is to consciously seek out social interactions where politics is off the table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life.  John Stuart Mill’s life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense.  Yet Mill’s life was in many respects unsatisfying – riven with anxiety and trauma.  What does Mill’s life teach us about meaningful lives?In John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press 2019), Elijah Millgram weaves intellectual biography together with philosophical analysis in the service of a distinctive style of moral philosophizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Dilek Huseyinzadegan analyzes Kant’s political writings by attending to the role of history, anthropology, and geography in his thought. She shows that Kant employs teleology as a means to orient us within the chaotic contingency of experience in order to plan and navigate a path to just political orders from our current conditions. Teleology, far from functioning as a deterministic principle in Kant’s work, provides a way to think through issues such as the importance of our historical narratives, cultural differences, and geographic limitations for politics. Huseyinzadegan argues that Kant proposes cosmopolitanism as the proper path for politics, not because it is a political ideal, but because—given where we’ve been, what we’re capable of, and the conditions in which we act—cosmopolitanism offers the most promising means of achieving the ultimate aim of politics, which is peace. Further, Huseyinzadegan shows that understanding the relationship of nonideal to ideal theory in Kant’s work exposes how Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism operate in his political theory and how we can and must theorize differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Why do zebras have stripes? One way to answer that question is ask what function stripes play in the lives of zebras – for example, to deter disease-carrying flies from biting them. This notion of a function plays a central role in biology: biologists frequently refer to the functions of many traits of evolved organisms. But not everything a trait causes is its function – the stripes might disorient some harmless birds, but that isn’t their function. So what determines the function of a trait? And what sort of explanations are offered when biologists claim that a trait has a particular function? In What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Justin Garson defends his generalized selected effects theory of what functions are and what they do. Garson, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY, argues that functions can result from differential retention as well as differential replication in a population, and that to refer to a trait’s function is to provide a condensed causal explanation. This accessible introduction to debates regarding functions in the philosophy of biology also considers how the generalized selected effects theory contributes to contemporary debates in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Much of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others.  Often this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the surrounding world—we must also know that we perceive together.  In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge.  Philosophical questions mount quickly: How is this kind of knowledge possible?  How does it arise?  What does its possibility show us about our sociality?  What does it suggest about the world around us?In The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space (MIT Press, 2019), Axel Seemann develops an account perceptual common knowledge that is both philosophically subtle and empirically informed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Philosophy of Language was a central concern in classical Indian Philosophy.  Philosophers in the tradition discussed testimony, pragmatics, and the religious implications of language, among other topics.  In his new book, Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Mukula's 'Fundamentals of the Communicative Function'(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Malcolm Keating looks at the views of the philosopher Mukula Bhatta, whose innovative position on meaning aimed to capture the differences between meaning in everyday speech and meaning in poetry. As Keating explains, Mukula “sets out a framework for how communication happens, from what words mean to how sentences are constructed to how people use language beyond its ordinary meanings” (p. 2). Keating offers a translation and interpretation of Mukula’s text, and also discusses numerous ways that Mukula’s thought (and classical Indian discussions of language in general) can be helpful for contemporary philosophers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy