It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,” which also seems to attribute a property—left-handedness to Bill. But what about a statement like “Bill is a Wookie?” As there is no property of being a Wookie, the statement seems then to be false. What’s called the error theory is the view that statements that attribute moral properties are always false, because no such properties exist. In Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgments (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bart Streumer offers a fascinating kind of defense of the error theory as it applies to all normative judgments: Streumer argues that the error theory cannot be believed, and its unbelievability makes the error theory more likely to be true.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Here’s a true sentence: The number seven is odd. What’s philosophically odd about the sentence is that it seems to imply that there must be numbers, including the number seven just as the truth of The Statue of Liberty is in New York implies that there is such a statue. But the number seven, unlike the statue, isn’t located anywhere, and we can’t see it or touch it. It is, Plato argued long ago, an abstract entity. But should we think reality includes abstract entities? In his deftly written critical survey Abstract Entities (Routledge, 2017), Sam Cowling provides a sophisticated discussion of what abstract (as opposed to concrete) entities might be, what reasons we have for thinking they exist, and how we might explain mathematical, scientific, and other truths, and our knowledge of such truths, if we don’t think they do. Cowling’s book is an excellent introduction to a fundamental metaphysical debate that brings together main arguments and raises new issues for both sides.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Middle-agedness is a curious phenomenon. In many ways, one is at one’s peak and also at the early stages of decline. There is much to do, but also dozens of paths irretrievably untaken. Successes, but also regrets. It’s no wonder that the idea of a midlife crisis is so familiar. But midlife is not commonly a subject of explicit philosophical study. In Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press, 2017), Kieran Setiya develops a philosophical account of the crises associated with midlife that combines the precision of a philosophical treatise with the narrative and advice-giving of a self-help manual. The result is a fascinating exploration of the challenges that come with growing old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a perspective on human morality that he describes as an “oughtology” based in naturalism, gleaned from comparing Western, Chinese, and Indian moral traditions. Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, considers how diverse moral traditions converge on some features basic to moral psychology, such as compassion, yet differ in other ways, such as whether anger is a justified and beneficial moral emotion or whether it should be extirpated. He also examines different views of the self, including the Buddhist view in which there is no self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so, how should it be countered? And: Is it possible to know something simply on the basis of another person’s say-so? In the background of all of these traditional questions is a broad concern thats not often explicitly addressed—the concern is with ignorance. We study the nature of knowledge so that we might better overcome ignorance. And yet ignorance is not often an explicit object of examination. In Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know (The MIT Press, 2017), Daniel DeNicola makes the case for placing ignorance at the center of epistemology. He argues that ignorance is not univocal; it comes in many forms, and the different forms need to be addressed in different ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him, she sees his face as angry even though it is neutral. Is it reasonable for Jill to believe he is angry on the basis of what she sees? No, argues Susanna Siegel: her perception has been hijacked by her prior unfounded belief, and so it cannot turn around and justify that belief even if Jill thinks it does. In The Rationality of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2017), Siegel articulates a new framework for understanding how to assess the capacity of perceptions to justify. On her view, perceptions, like beliefs, can be appraised as rational or irrational, and can be inferred from beliefs. She uses her view in turn to explain when and how the influence of a prior outlook on a perceptions ability to justify that outlook can be downgraded or upgraded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child. And we all recognize that many of these decisions are impactful. More specifically, we know that the choices parents make often deeply impact the lives of others, including especially the life of the child. Given the sheer number of impactful and other-regarding choices involved, one might expect parenthood to be a major site of philosophical attention. But it isn’t really. In The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jean Kazez philosophically engages with a broad sample of the questions that parents must confront. Her analyses are philosophically nuanced but also accessible to non-academic readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as race and gender. Social constructionists argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustice begins with recognizing they are not. At the same time, the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who considers herself black, makes clear that even if race is not biological, it doesn’t follow that race is a matter of personal choice. So how should we understand what social construction involves? In The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016), Ron Mallon articulates a view of social construction that draws on philosophy, psychology, and social theory. He identifies an element of essentialist thinking in some human kind concepts, and elaborates the mechanisms by which human categories and our representations of those categories form a constructivist loop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious of the very idea of expertise in political matters. Long traditions in political philosophy have proposed various responses to Plato. According to a predominant trend in contemporary democratic theory, public deliberation can serve to meet Plato’s challenges. Yet appeals to public deliberation seem to reintroduce some of Plato’s worries. Does the commitment to public deliberation suggest, with Plato, that wisdom should rule? How can a democracy introduce an ideal of public deliberation that remains democratic? In Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alfred Moore examines the role of expertise in democratic deliberation. He defends the idea that the epistemic authority of experts derives its political force from processes of popular contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-epistemic values and interests in science, generally agreeing that such influences are undesirable even if they are inevitable. In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Jan de Winter argues that the direct influence of non-epistemic interests in science is not invariably epistemically problematic. In his view, what is mistaken for an epistemic problem is often simply a lack of transparency regarding the interests involved in how scientific decisions have been reached. De Winter, who is an independent scholar, also defends a conception of epistemic integrity in the conduct of scientific research that does not presuppose a distinction between interests that are external to science (such as financial interests) and those which are internal to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy