The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions? In Philosophy and Climate Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Eric Winsberg presents the elements of climate science in an accessible but rigorous framework that emphasizes their relation to a variety of key debates in the philosophy of science: the relation between evidence and theory, the nature and uses of models and simulations, the types of probability involved, the role of values in science, and others. Winsberg, who is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, both explains how climate scientists try to understand the chaotic and complex system that is the earth’s atmosphere, and uses climate science as an extended case study of how scientific knowledge is created and debated before it is used to inform public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We’re all familiar with some of the ways that time figures into our political environment.  Things such as term limits, waiting periods, deadlines, and criminal sentences readily come to mind.  But there are also protocols, accords, mandates, and contracts, and these frequently invoke temporal bounds of various kinds.  In fact, when you think of it, a full range of political phenomena are structured by time.  And yet time seems to have eluded political theorists and philosophers. In The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cohen undertakes an examination of the role temporality plays in liberal democratic politics.  She develops a fascinating argument according to which time is both a political value and an instrument that can distort value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

There are five people on the track and a runaway trolley that will hit them, and you are on a footbridge over the track with a large person whose body can stop the trolley in its tracks. Should you push the large person to his death to save the five on the track? Using hypothetical cases and questions about them to elicit judgments is a prominent method of analytic philosophy to discover modal or necessary truths – truths about what must be the case. The method is used to consider what action is right, whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise, whether knowledge requires something more than justified true belief, whether the mind must depend on the body, and so on. In his new book Philosophy Within Proper Bounds (Oxford University Press, 2017),  Edouard Machery draws on more than a decade of experimental philosophical and psychological research by himself and others to argue that the method of cases should be shelved. On his view, variations across study subjects by demographic factors such as age and by presentation effects such as the order in which cases are presented show that the results of the method are fundamentally unreliable, and that we should suspend judgment about their results. Machery recommends instead a reorientation of the mainstream analytical philosophical tradition: philosophers should limit themselves to modally modest questions, and they can engage in a modified psychological form of conceptual analysis in which we seek to understand what sets of automatic inferences individuals or groups tend to draw, rather than seeking conceptually necessary truths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Delving into John Rawls' political philosophy and his call for a socialist economic order, challenging traditional views of justice and social equality. Exploring Rawls's perspective on socialism, fair value, and social ownership of means of production within the framework of justice's fairness. Analyzing the evolution of Rawls's theory of justice and his focus on cultivating attitudes for social justice within society.

Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organisms confront and the problem of how we recognizing the same distal objects and properties again, as well as their kinds and categories. Our cognizing machinery includes unitrackers, whose job it is to track these items and channel information of the same item to one place, called a unicept. Although each of us has distinct unitrackers and unicepts, they can be attached to the same word in a public language, which itself is a lineage of reproduced signs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

My guest today is Christian Miller. Christian is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.  He is a moral philosopher specializing on character, with special interest in the empirical study of the virtues and vices. He currently directs The Beacon Project, which studies morally exemplars; and he has recently completed a 5-year research project called The Character Project.  His latest book is titled The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017) Moral thinking and evaluation often occur at the level of the person.  We find ourselves asking not simply “What ought I do?” but “Who should I be?”  Similarly, in assessing others, we tend to evaluate their behavior be means of concepts that ascribe to them character traits of various kinds–these are virtue and vice concepts such as generous, untrustworthy, timid, honest, and so on.  A long tradition going back at least as far as Aristotle takes the person’s character to be the fundamental item of moral evaluation.  But an equally long tradition wonders what, exactly, character is.  And, more recently, experimental studies of human behavior have given reason to wonder whether there is such a thing as a person’s character at all. In The Character Gap, Christian Miller reviews the philosophical and psychological material pertaining to character.  Miller defends the thesis that although there is such a thing as character, most of us lack both the virtues and the vices. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce to time, and that humans have a role in constructing manifest time and organizing the manifest world. McLeod, who is associate professor of philosophy and Asian studies at the University of Connecticut, also considers Mayan views of essences, truth, personal identity, and meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We all put a great deal of care into protecting, managing, and monitoring our reputation. But the precise nature of a reputation is obscure. In one sense, reputation is merely hearsay, a popular perception that may or may not have any basis in fact. Yet we rely heavily on reputations for example, when were choosing a restaurant, mechanic, or physician. Accordingly, multiple sites on social media are devoted to helping us to discover the reputation of service providers, social events, and even people. Still, reputation can be manipulated. Is it rational to care so much about reputation? In Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters (Princeton University Press, 2018), Gloria Origgi explores a broad range of questions about reputation. Bringing together the tools of philosophical analysis and work in sociology and psychology, Origgi presents a complex picture of what reputations are, how they spread, and when they are reliable.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if one disagrees with Kuhn, how can this change be shown to be rational? More generally, how can transitions from one set of normative standards to another be rational, given that there is no neutral position from which to criticize one’s own normative standards? In Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Menachem Fisch takes up this challenge, defending an account of framework change which accepts that we cannot be self-critical of our own standards, but we can be destabilized by external criticism. Some of those who are “ambivalated” in this way creatively attempt to tackle their ambivalence by developing hybrid theories that provide others in a scientific community with a means to critically assess their frameworks and develop new ones. Fisch, who is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, draws on work from Korsgaard, Friedman, Galison, McDowell and others in a rich discussion of the dynamics of normativity in science, illustrated with a case study of debates on the foundations of algebra in the 1830s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationships or elements of evolutionary theory. In A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (MIT Press, 2017), Karen Neander synthesizes a number of such elements into a causal-informational version of teleosemantics to explain sensory-perceptual content: for example, the content of a toad’s perception when it perceives what we would call a fly. Neander is a leader in the philosophy of mind, and this accessible yet precisely written book is the culmination of much of her work to date on the theory of intentionality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy