New Books in 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

At the heart of our moral thinking lies trouble with our selves.  The self lies at morality’s core; selves are intimately connected to the proper objects of moral evaluation.  But a common theme of moral theory is that the self, and concern with the self, is the source of much that is immoral: selfishness, greed, vanity, arrogance, envy, and so on.  Many moral views that otherwise are opposed to each other seem to agree that being good requires some kind of dissociation with the self.  And the transcending of the self is a central theme of our most popular religious traditions. Yet selves are not going away.  Indeed, culturally the self is increasingly dominant.  We now use the first-personal pronouns as a prefixes: we use iPods to listen to iTunes, and use our iPhones to take “selfies.” And all of this self-assertion seems connected to social ills stemming from lack of concern with other selves.  The question, then, is how to discern the proper degree of self-regard. In Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love (Princeton University Press, 2014), Simon Blackburn explores the complex phenomena surrounding selves and self-regard, offering deep insights into notions like pride, ambition, vanity, authenticity, and much else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism: a process of comparing predicted sensory input with actual input, updating our hypotheses in light of the difference, and generating new predictions. In The Predictive Mind (Oxford University Press), Jakob Hohwy introduces this theory to a wider audience, develops the theory’s explanation of perception, and explores its potential for explaining consciousness, attention, representation, and mental illness. In this interview, Hohwy, who is associate professor of philosophy at Monash University, considers how the theory turns the traditional view of perception on its head and addresses its implications for the relation between cognition and perception and the possibility of knowledge of the external world. 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 longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character.  Aristotle stands at the head of this tradition, and he held that moral theory must take as its center a theory of the good man; he hence devised an elaborate conception of the virtues–those dispositions and traits constitutive of the good life for human beings.  Virtue ethics thrives to this day.  In fact, virtue theorizing has been applied to other normative domains, including especially epistemology. In Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mark Alfano investigates the ways in which virtue ethics and epistemology are affected by recent results from behavioral sciences that call into question the idea that humans sustain stable and robust character traits.  Drawing on a range of empirical data, Alfano suggests a reinterpretation of the virtues.  Rather than seeing them as steady and fixed dispositions to act across a broad range of situations, Alfano argues that virtue attributions be seen more as self-fulfilling prophecies: when we properly attribute courage to a person, we heighten her tendency to behave in courageous ways.  Alfano then extends this account to the intellectual virtues discussed by virtue epistemologists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”. But even in philosophy of biology, attention has largely been on the concepts and abstract mathematics of evolutionary biology, not the in-the-trenches work of cell biology. Melinda B. Fagan, associate professor of philosophy at Rice University, stakes out new ground in Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology: Knowledge in Flesh and Blood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which was recently selected as an outstanding academic title by Choice magazine. Fagan examines the interplay of experimental manipulation of cells and tissues with the mathematical modeling of cells and their developmental landscapes, and the interaction between the methods and goals of scientific knowledge production with the practical therapeutic goals of clinical medicine. She discusses the basic concepts of stem cell biology, its experimental and collaborative methods, and its models, and considers how these features alter our thinking about evidence, explanation, causality, unification, and the role of values in science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy