New Books in Philosophy

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and observed the result. The model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be: it would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Weisberg examines the nature, development and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at concrete models (such as the Bay Area model), computational models and mathematical models to argue for a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures, and their relation to the part of the world they model is in terms of weighted feature-mapping. His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Philosopher Michael Huemer discusses the puzzling idea of political authority, arguing that it does not exist. He explores the concepts of authority, coercion, and obedience, challenging the moral standing of the state. The conversation also touches on anarchism, social contract theory, and the psychology of obedience to authority figures.

Art and ethics are linked philosophically by the fact that they are both fall under value theory; and some aestheticians, notably Berys Gaut, have argued for a direct connection between aesthetic and moral values, in that the moral values that an artwork may embody can raise or lower its aesthetic value. In Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2013), Jennifer A. McMahon argues that aesthetic and moral judgments are intrinsically linked by the fact that they contain a common element of community-calibrated subjective responses, and that as a result by reflecting on art we also exercise this element of moral judgment. McMahon, who is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, draws on Kant, pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, contemporary philosophers of mind such as Susanna Siegel, and interviews with contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson and Doris Salcedo, to argue for and illustrate her view. 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 shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past. But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm. That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our present would not be. How is this mixture of regret and affirmation to be understood? In his new book, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford University Press, 2013), R. Jay Wallace explores the complicated dynamic surrounding regret and affirmation. He develops a view that reconciles the apparent contradiction between regretting something that was a necessary antecedent to some attachment that one must now affirm. But in laying out this reconciliation, Wallace uncovers a pervasive and disconcerting truth about the human condition, namely that we must affirm aspects of our lives that are undeniably the products of highly objectionable features of the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Muhammad Ali Khalidi, associate professor of philosophy at York University, argues for what he calls an “epistemic” view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues. On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially-constructed. 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 the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a formidable anti-democratic argument: Only truth or wisdom confer authority, and since democracy is the rule of the unwise, it has no authority.  This rough line of argument has proven so formidable, in fact, that many democratic theorists have tried to evade it by explicitly denying that politics has anything to do with wisdom.  But another strand of democratic theory takes the argument by the horns and tries to show that democracy is indeed epistemically sound.  Some of these views try to show that democracy, warts and all, is yet wiser than the alternatives.  But others have proposed a more ambitious reply according to which democracy has a positive epistemic value. In her new book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), Helene Landemore pursues this more ambitious path.  She argues that empirical data pertaining to the epistemic significance of cognitive diversity shows that democracy is uniquely placed to supply distinctive epistemic goods.  Along the way, she explores a range of current findings regarding the “wisdom of crowds”  and also engages core issues at the heart of normative political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls “mindshaping”. Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural learners, and to conform to and enforce social norms, and in Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (MIT Press, 2013), Zawidzki defends the idea that mind-shaping is the basic capacity from which the rest of social cognition evolves. Most researchers hold that mind-reading – our “theory of mind” – is the linch-pin of the rest: our ability to ascribe to one another mental states with propositional content is necessary for sophisticated language use and for mindshaping. Zawidzki argues, in contrast, that our ability to “homogenize” our minds via mindshaping is what makes sophisticated mind-reading and language possible. On his view, language didn’t evolve so that we could express thought; it evolved so that we could express our commitment to cooperative behavior. Zawidzki’s innovative approach centers on reinterpreting and extending Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance to explain the social-cognitive development of the species and of individuals. 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 shaped by a deep commitment to the moral equality of all persons.  This thought drives us to think, for example, that each person’s life is of equal moral importance, that each person is deserving of equal regard, that no one’s life is intrinsically more morally important than any other, and so on.  However, our lives are organized around what might be called special relationships – friendships, marriages, families, and such – and these relationships carry with them duties to show certain others special regard.  Indeed, we would find fault with a father who did not show a certain degree of partiality for his own child.  There seems to be a conflict.  In order to manage it, we need a clear account of the moral nature of duties and reasons of partiality. In his new book, Partiality (Princeton University Press, 2013), Simon Keller examines the leading accounts of partiality, and finds them lacking.  He develops an original view of partiality according to which our reasons and duties of partiality arise from the relationships that we share with others which permit us to respond properly to the value of individuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

“If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin”, a “zone of absolute obscurity” in which their mode of existence from a philosophical perspective is not even question-worthy. So writes Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in the Basque autonomous region of Spain, in his new book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). The metaphor of “ground-breaking” has never been so apt. Contrasting his view with the Aristotelean perspective in which plants are basically defective animals, Marder initiates inquiry into the nature of vegetal life on its own terms, and into how human life currently encounters, and how it should encounter, this radically foreign mode of existence. Marder’s goal is nothing less than a sort of Nietzschean “revaluation of values” when it comes to vegetal life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language.  This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation, where we hear the sounds others make, and infer from those sounds the communicative intentions of speakers.  On this view, communication is a highly deliberate affair, involving complex mediating processes of inference and interpersonal reasoning. In his new book, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists (Oxford University Press 2013), Jody Azzouni accepts the idea that we must begin theorizing language from the perspective of language use.  But nonetheless he rejects this common picture.  In fact, Azzouni argues that the common view actually misconstrues our experience as communicators.  On Azzouni’s alternative, we involuntarily perceive language items as public objects that have meaning properties independently of speaker intentions.  Put differently, Azzouni argues that meaning is perceived, not inferred, much in the way we perceive the properties of physical objects. And yet he also argues that our perception of there being a common language– such as English– which supplies a common vehicle for communication is a kind of inescapable collective illusion.  What’s more, Azzouni argues that the view that a common language is an illusion makes better sense of our experiences and practices with language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy