New Books in 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

The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed language. In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2012), Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, focuses on the question: how do we represent time? That is, how is temporal information represented in biological creatures such as ourselves? Blending empirical research on biological timekeeping mechanisms and psychological measures of simultaneity judgments with philosophical accounts of mental representation and consciousness, Montemayor argues that traditional discussions of the “specious present” confuse two sorts of representations of the present. The empirical evidence points instead to a two-phase model: the sensorial present and the phenomenal present. The first is a non-conscious, multi-modal simultaneity window that is closely tied to our biological clocks and that informs our sensorimotor systems. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules. And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced. Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break the rules. Hence society features a broad system of institutions by which we punish. But there is a deep and longstanding philosophical disagreement over what, precisely, punishment is for. The standard views are easy to anticipate. Some say that we punish in order to give offenders what they deserve. Others claim that we punish in order to encourage others to obey the rules. Still others see punishment as a process of rehabilitating offenders. Recent theorists have attempted to combine these views in various ways. The debates go on. In his new book, Punishment (Routledge, 2012), Thom Brooks reviews the leading debates concerning punishment and makes a compelling case for a distinctive theory of punishment called the “unified theory.” Brooks contends that the unified theory can embrace several highly intuitive penal goals while avoiding the philosophical difficulties confronting each of the competing theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief, desire and other propositional attitudes; they are what we agree and disagree about in conversation, and they are what is communicated in successful discourse. By philosophical tradition, propositions have their truth values eternally; that is, they always include a reference to a time as a component, and if true, they are always true. The proposition expressed in English by the sentence It is raining in Malta is more completely expressed by something like It is raining in Malta at noon local time on May 4, 2013. This standard view is called eternalism. In her new book Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard, associate professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, calls this traditional view into question. Brogaard defends temporalism, the claim that some propositions do not have their truth values eternally – they lack a time-stamp. She argues instead that eternalists cannot adequately explain how we retain beliefs over time, how we modify beliefs, and how we agree and disagree over the span of an ordinary conversation, and she presents a new argument for temporalism from the phenomenology of conscious mental states. Her lucid and comprehensive discussion is a milestone in debates about our experience of time as expressed in natural language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.” According to this maxim, the meaning of a concept or a proposition is ultimately to be defined in terms of the “sensible” and “practical” effects it would produce in the course of experimental action. That is, of course, a crude articulation. But, according to Peirce, the view of meaning that the maxim articulates has vast philosophical implications. Peirce’s pragmatism is at once anti-skeptical, fallibilist, verificationist, inferentialist, and realist. Indeed, that looks like a motley crowd of philosophical commitments. How might they be made to hang together? In his new book, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), Christopher Hookway explores the complexities of Peirce’s philosophy. With chapters devoted to topics ranging from Peirce’s fallibilism, his philosophy of language, his views on mathematics, his rejection of psychologism, and his theory of abduction, Hookway presents Peircean pragmatism as a formidable and strikingly contemporary philosophy. Hookway’s book will be of great interest to anyone interested in pragmatism and the history of 20th-century philosophy, but it also has much to offer to those working on current debates in fields like epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy