New Books in Philosophy

On any mature view, war is horrific. Naturally, there is a broad range of fundamental ethical questions regarding war. According to most moral theories, war is nonetheless sometimes permitted, and perhaps even obligatory. But even an obligatory war may be fought in a morally impermissible way. So it makes sense to distinguish the moral questions concerning the decision to wage war from the questions concerning the conduct of soldiers, armies, and states in the course of fighting a war. There is a large and growing contemporary literature devoted to these questions. Surprisingly absent from these discussions are utilitarian views of the morality of war. In Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War (Routledge, 2016) William H. Shaw of San Jose State University provides a much needed utilitarian analysis of the ethics of war. Shaw proposes a fundamental utilitarian principle regarding the moral rightness of waging war, and then argues on utilitarian grounds for a compelling conception of the morality, duties, and responsibilities that apply to those fighting a war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Political states claim the moral right to rule the persons living within their jurisdiction; they claim the authority to make and enforce laws, establish policies, and allocate benefits and burdens of various kinds. But states also claim rights over their territories. These include rights to establish and protect borders, to control airspace, extract and use natural resources on and beneath their geographical region. Philosophers have long wondered about the basis for states claims to authority over persons. But there are additional questions regarding the territorial authority claimed by states. How do states come to possess rights to the natural resources that lie beneath the ground? How might the moral character of the initial acquisition of land impact a states present claims to authority? In Boundaries of Authority (Oxford University Press, 2016) A. John Simmons (University of Virginia) argues that leading accounts of state authority are insufficient to address successfully the distinctive questions regarding state boundaries. Building on his own Lockean individualist account of authority, Simmons develops a philosophical conception of how the moral rights claimed by states could be justified.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not unique to Europe, it was there that Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. In his latest book, Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2016), J.D. Trout mounts a spirited defense of the claim that the best explanation of the rise of science in 17th Century Europe is that Newton and others got lucky; among other serendipitous factors, they happened to come up with versions of preexisting ideas that were just right enough to explain just enough of the world, and that was enough to get the ball rolling. Trout, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, defends the scientific realist view that scientific theories are successful because they are by and large true, not just predictively accurate. He also sharply distinguishes the psychology of explanation–the Aha! feeling of understanding–from the truth of an explanation. On his ontic view of explanation, we can experience being satisfied with bad (false) explanations, and there are true theories we may never understand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how complex is revealed in Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care? (Oxford University Press, 2016), Kenneth Schaffner’s assessment of the impact of recent biological research on the genetic contribution to behavior. Among the developments he considers are the sequencing of the human genome and the development of a model organism, the nematode C. Elegans, for exploring the relationship between genes, neural function, and development. Schaffner, who is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses the methodologies for determining genetic influence and the challenges by developmentalists and others of gene-focused research. He also defends a “creeping” form of reduction in which multilevel mechanistic explanations are possible in local, specific areas of biology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In fact, our day-to-day lives are saturated with inducements not only to become angry, but to embrace the idea that anger is morally righteous. However, at the same time, were all familiar with the ways in which anger can go morally wrong. We know that anger can eat away at us; it can render us morally blind; it can engulf our entire lives. So one might wonder: What exactly is the point of anger? In Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016), Martha Nussbaum argues that, in its most familiar forms, anger is not only pointless, but morally confused and pernicious. Drawing lessons from the Stoics, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Nussbaum advocates replacing anger with forms of generosity, friendship, justice, and kindness. She develops her critique of anger across the spectrum of human experience, from the intimate, to the interpersonal, and eventually the political. Along the way, she proposes important revisions to common ideas about punishment, justice, and social reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

There is a long history in philosophy, art and religion of claims about the ineffable from The One in Plotinus to Kant’s noumena or thing-in-itself to Wittgenstein’s famous remark at the end of Tractatus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But even if the ineffable cannot, in some sense, be expressed, what can we say about what it is to be ineffable? What sorts of things are ineffable and what sense can be made of the claim that these things are ineffable? In her new book, Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Silvia Jonas argues that there is no defensible sense in which there are ineffable objects, properties, propositions, or contents. There are however varieties of ineffable knowledge, and the core of these is the idea of a kind of knowledge based on acquaintance, specifically self-acquaintance. Jonas, who is a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, brings together historical and contemporary claims about and concepts of the ineffable, and provides a critique that will ground and inform philosophical discussion of the ineffable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The pragmatist tradition in philosophy tends to focus on the pioneering work of its founding trio of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, who together proposed and developed a distinctive kind of naturalist empiricism. Though they disagreed sharply over central issues concerning truth and meaning, the original pragmatists shared a commitment to the primacy of practice and human experience, and a corresponding distaste for abstract philosophical theorizing. It comes as no surprise, then, that pragmatist work in value theory tends to focus on normative and applied ethics; there is very little in classical pragmatism that one would count as meta-ethics. But philosophical landscapes change, and the area of meta-ethics is at present vibrant with philosophical debates that matter for moral practice, despite their being abstract. It turns out that getting a workable and attractive conception of moral life requires one to address the technical questions of meta-ethics. Accordingly, contemporary pragmatists need to work out a pragmatist meta-ethics. In Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics (Routledge, 2016), Diana Heney gathers crucial philosophical resources from the classical pragmatists in providing a distinctively pragmatist defense of moral cognitivism and meta-ethical generalism. Her book combines a nuanced reading of the history of pragmatism with a sophisticated intervention in contemporary meta-ethical theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell claimed it is a truism that there are facts: the planets revolve around the sun, 2 + 2 = 4, elephants are bigger than mice. In Against Facts (MIT Press, 2015), Arianna Betti argues that not only is it not a truism that there are facts, but that on either of the basic views of what facts are, there aren’t any. Betti, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, argues that we don’t need to posit facts as truthmakers or as the referents of that-clauses we can express truths about the world and provide an adequate semantics without needing recourse to special entities called “facts”. Betti’s finely articulated discussion and rebuttal of defenses of facts by Russell, David Armstrong, Kit Fine, and others will be a main resource for debate about facts, and related notions of propositions and states of affairs, for years to come.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But additionally there are epistemological questions about these communities. Though frequently dismissed as simply ignorant, misinformed, or superstitious, it turns out that vaccine suspicion, denial, and refusal are positively correlated with higher levels of education, and greater depth of knowledge about vaccine science. Accordingly, the common view that vaccine refusal is the product of ignorance seems simplistic. Yet the more strident forms of vaccine refusal are based in demonstrably false beliefs. How is this best explained? In Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care (Routledge 2016) Mark Navin offers a balanced examination of the epistemology and value commitments of various stripes of vaccine refusal. After arguing that vaccine refusers may be reasonable, he defends a novel version of the view that there is a moral requirement to vaccinate one’s children. He then defends the claim that the State may use coercive means to enhance vaccination, but Navin makes room for exemptions for non-medical reasons. Navin’s book is a fascinating philosophical exploration of some very deep questions at the intersection of social epistemology and social ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy