New Books in 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

What do we mean when we claim that something is a cause of something else that smoking causes cancer, that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused World War I, that the 8-ball caused the other billiard ball to go into the side pocket? In Causation, Evidence, and Inference (Routledge 2015), Julian Reiss defends an inferentialist account in which causal claims are inferred from evidence for a hypothesis and are the basis of inferences to other consequences. Reiss, who is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, argues that causal claims depend on contextual factors, such as background knowledge and the purpose for making the claim, and that such claims are pluralistic due to the variety of kinds of evidence from which they can be inferred. Focusing on causal claims in the biomedical and social sciences, he provides a critical overview of prominent theories of causation and evidence, and argues that his view can overcome many of the problems that have been raised for these views. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Moral life is infused with emotionally-charged interactions. When a stranger carelessly steps on my foot, I not only feel pain in my foot, I also am affronted by her carelessness. Whereas the former may cause me to wince, the latter arouses resentment, which can be communicated with an emotionally-toned protest, Um. . . excuse me. . . With this a protest, I hold the stranger responsible for her act. Yet there are cases where the stranger who steps on my foot does not manifest an objectionable carelessness. After all, she may have been pushed, or perhaps had been feeling faint. Such conditions mitigate resentment, render my emotional response unfitting and in need of revision. This much seems trivial. Distinctively philosophical questions arise when we consider cases where agents are in certain ways compromised or impaired. Imagine that the stranger is in the grip of dementia, or in a fit of rage that has rendered her unable to control the motion of her limbs. Would resentment be fitting in such cases? Now, what if the stranger is cognitively incapable of empathy, and so is unable to see what reason she has to avoid stepping on others feet? In short, we may ask when certain facts about the condition and capacities of individuals render them unfitting targets for responsibility responses such as resentment. And what are we morally to make of such agents? In Responsibility from the Margins (Oxford University Press, 2015), David Shoemaker proposes a tripartite view of responsibility which can make sense of our responses to persons whose agency is compromised. The book brings together high-level philosophy with a deep appreciation for the empirical details concerning the various forms of marginal agency it discussed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

One of the important ways we use language is to make assertions – roughly, to pass on information we believe to be true to others. Insofar as we need to learn by means of what others they tell us, assertion is a speech act that addresses this need. It also follows norms – ordinarily, we shouldn’t assert things that we believe to be false, and when we do we have violated a norm of assertion. In The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Rachel McKinnon argues against the prevailing idea that you need to know what you assert, and holds that we can even blamelessly assert something that we know to be false. McKinnon, an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston, defends a reasons-based norm in which the end goal of transmitting knowledge to others can be fulfilled by asserting falsehoods, and in which whether we have satisfied the norm depends heavily on the conventional and pragmatic contexts in which we make our assertions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Many are introduced to philosophy by way of a confrontation with the kind of radical skepticism associated with Rene Descartes: Might I right now be dreaming? Might everything I think I know be the product of some grand deception perpetrated by a malevolent demon? Today, many philosophers seems simply to dismiss radical skepticism as unworthy of our attention; however, the skeptical challenge lingers, and, for many, it still is a source of concern. In Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton University Press, 2015), Duncan Pritchard offers a sustained response to radical skepticism. He first shows that radical skepticism comes in two varieties, each of which calls for its own response. He then offers a two-part solution to radical skepticism. Ultimately, Pritchard offers a cure for epistemic angst, but one that allows for ongoing insecurity about our epistemic condition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and mysteries of the world’s religions. In Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World (Columbia University Press), Eric Dietrich argues that the human thirst for mystery would still be slated even if we explain away the mysteries of religion in scientific, specifically evolutionary, terms. Among the strange “excellent beauties”, he claims, are consciousness and infinity. Dietrich, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, describes the structure of spiritual journeys, the social-bonding role of religious belief and our ineliminably “Janus-faced” nature as creatures who dislike open-ended mysteries but love magical thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), Brian Epstein argues that such views of social facts are untenably anthropocentric: social facts supervene on much more than just people. His model distinguishes two kinds of questions that a theory of social ontology must answer. When are social categories realized, or what grounds a social fact (such as the fact that someone is a war criminal)? And what explains how these categories get established, or what anchors the category? Epstein, an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University, also uses his model to provide a new analysis of group action and group intention. On his view, group action is not exhausted by the actions of members, and group intention depends on more than member attitudes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy