New Books in Philosophy

Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments.  Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting.  It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible.  For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised.   We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is permissible.  Indeed, these exclusion are often thought to be consistent with universal suffrage. In Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford University Press, 2014), Claudio Lopez-Guerra challenges our common understanding of voting.  Ultimately, he argues in favor of an elitist system of enfranchisement by lottery.  He also criticizes arguments that universal suffrage is consistent with the exclusion of children, the mentally impaired, felons, and resident non-citizens.  The result is a fascinating and provocative exploration of, and challenge to, the fundamental idea that voting is a basic right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life After Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Eric Steinhart presents core tenets of digitalism, a theology that transposes philosophical and theological concepts, principles, and arguments about the self, the universe and the nature of divinity into the conceptual framework of computer science. By defending the idea that everything is a computation, Steinhart, who is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University, defends a new way of thinking about the nature of life and the nature of death, and thus about the question of life after death. In his version of digitalism, there is no such thing as judgment in the Christian sense; your soul is simply a program that will rerun on a progression of superior computers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking down the street together. The former involves coordinated action and intention; but the latter involves something more–what we might think of as a shared intention.  Once we recognize that shared activity involved share intentions, a range of distinctively philosophical questions emerge: What are shared intentions?  What is their structure?  How do they emerge?  How are they connected to group action? In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael E. Bratman addresses such questions.  He argues that the planning theory of individual agency that he has developed in previous work provides sufficient resources for understanding small-scale instances of acting together.  His claim, then, is that modestly social agency can be accounted for without the introduction of new philosophical elements such as “we intentions” and “joint commitment.”   Bratman provides a model of group action and intention that is philosophically sparing but explanatorily powerful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A day after Stephen Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained, “You never take me for ice cream any more.” Yablo initially responded that this was obviously false. But Yablo, who is professor of philosophy and linguistics at MIT, also noticed something interesting: that Zina said something true about their formerly regular activity of going for ice cream, and that she expressed this truth by saying something false. Wrapping truth in falsehood is common in ordinary conversation, but hard to reconcile with standard philosophical semantics, in which sentences only have truth conditions. In Aboutness (Princeton University Press, 2014), Yablo argues that sentences also have and are about subject matters, and that their subject matters are constrained but not determined by their truth conditions. To express and grasp truths, we often use language that goes beyond what we want to say and then subtract from the whole of what is said to expose the part we really care about: its subject matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise.  And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern. In Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Susan Haack brings her skill as an epistemologist to bear on a series of tangles concerning the legal concepts of proof, evidence, and reliability, especially as they apply in a series of notorious toxic tort cases. Along the way, she exposes several philosophical confusions in the law’s current understanding of the epistemological concepts it wields, and shows how her own distinctive epistemology–Foundherentism–can be useful to the law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When she sees a red tomato for the first time, she learns something new: what it’s like to experience red. The Knowledge Argument has been a key move in philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the brain. In Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Richard Fumerton argues that the most motivated defense of the dualist position stems from a commitment to an internalist foundationalist epistemology – in much the way that Descartes argued for dualism centuries ago. Fumerton, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, weaves together discussion of core debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language to show how critical choices in these areas affect the force of the knowledge argument. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value. This much is commonplace. What is not frequently noticed is that our practices of valuing and finding meaning in our lives draw upon the presumption that others will outlive us, that there will be generations of human beings continuing into the future. One way to grasp the significance of this presumption is to imagine a scenario in which we know that humanity has no future. How would this knowledge affect our lives in the present? Would the pursuit of our goals matter? What do our likely reactions to the imagined scenario tell us about value? And what does the envisioned scenario tell us about how we should regard our own death? In Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013), Samuel Scheffler carefully explores these questions. His surprising suggestion is that much of the value that we find in our own lives depends upon inevitability of our own death and the existence of others who will survive us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Anne Jaap Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion of representation is actually used in cognitive neuroscience. On her view, mental items do not stand in intentional relations to the world, as standard theories of mental representation hold. Instead, they are samples or instances of the same kinds, as captured by common mathematical descriptions. This sampling model has its roots in Aristotle and Hume, but is found in contemporary neuroscience, such as when seeing a particular action causes the neural pattern for doing that action to be activated. In this interview, Jacobson explains and expands on her view, which she dubs Aristotelian representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The long tradition of moral philosophy employs a familiar collection of basic concepts. These include concepts like agent, act, intention, consequence, responsibility, obligation, the right, and the good. Typically, contemporary moral theorists simply inherit these conceptual materials, and they use them to stake their positions within the terrain that is established by these concepts. But we must recognize the possibility that the categories and distinctions that form moral philosophy’s bedrock can nonetheless obscure or distract from salient moral phenomena. Sometimes one needs to fashion new conceptual tools, and refashion the old ones, in order to get handle on things. In Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness (MIT Press, 2013), Elise Springer identifies a sphere of moral phenomena that she argues are as yet under-theorized. These phenomena have to do with the activities associated with certain forms of moral criticism that target not simply what another has brought about, nor simply the intentions and attitudes another has expressed by means of an action, but also a concern with how another has employed her agency. Springer argues that in order to properly theorize the activities associated with calling attention to the agency of others, moral philosophers need to adopt a collection of new concepts. Communicating Moral Concern is a systematic and exciting reorientation of moral theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains a core idea of the cognitive sciences today. In Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 2013), Marcin Milkowski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academy of Sciences, defends a minimalist view of computationalism as information processing, with the intention of providing a general view of computational explanation that covers all the forms in which information-processing explanations appear. On Milkowski’s view, Jerry Fodor’s slogan that there is no computation without representation should be replaced with the claim that there is no representation without computation, and David Marr’s computational, algorithmic, and implementation levels for describing of complex systems should be replaced with talk of different compositional levels in mechanistic explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy