New Books in Philosophy

Culturally, idleness is widely derided as laziness, uselessness, and sloth.  Even within philosophy, the idle are criticized for being wasteful, selfish, and free-loading. Indeed, throughout the history of moral and political philosophy, it is frequently asserted (though not often argued) that humans must be perpetually active, busy, and, in a word, productive?  But why?  Is there really nothing to be said for idling? In Idleness: A Philosophical Essay (Princeton University Press, 2018), Brian O’Connor examines a range of anti-idleness views, and finds them lacking.  He then proposes an alternative according to which idleness is a component of human freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in a war? – leads to an extended discussion of such themes as rebirth and reincarnation and the personal paths to unity with the universe through the yogas of action, knowledge, and devotion. In Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), Keya Maitra presents a new translation aimed at those who are interested in themes that cross-fertilize with Western philosophical debates regarding the nature of morality, the relation between body and self or mind, the roots of character, and the goal of a well-lived life. Maitra, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina – Asheville, aims at a middle ground of accessibility with recognition of the multiple and context-dependent meanings of Sanskrit terms, and the philosophical themes are elaborated with the aid of questions that are appropriate for both Western and non-Western approaches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Humor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions.  As one would expect, these pervasive phenomena occasion philosophical questions.  What renders some item or event humorous?  Are funny jokes objectively so?  As humor is a mode of interacting with others, can it be deployed irresponsibly?  Can it be harmful and impermissible?  What is the relation between humor and comedy?  What is a comedian? In Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy (Routledge 2018), Steven Gimbel presents a philosophical account of humor.  He develops a view according to which an act is humorous if and only if it is a conspicuous, intentional act of playful cleverness.  This account of humor then enables Gimbel to address a full palate of questions concerning jokes and comedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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