New Books in Philosophy

It’s taken for granted among analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry – ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, in particular – involve a special and characteristic methodology that depends essentially on the use of intuitions as evidence for philosophical positions. A thought experiment is developed in order to elicit intuitive judgments, and these judgments have a special epistemic status. Paradigm cases of this methodology include Gettier cases, in which we judge whether the subject in the scenario has or does not have knowledge, and Putnam’s Twin-Earth cases, in which we judge whether the contents of thought depend on the physical nature of a thinker’s environment. The new experimental philosophy movement also accepts this assumption, as it is premised on rejecting it by conducting real experiments (with non-philosophers as subjects) rather than thought-experiments. In Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Herman Cappelen, professor of philosophy at the Arche Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews, argues that this assumption is simply false as a descriptive claim about the practice of contemporary analytic philosophy. Instead, a detailed look at the thought experiments shows that uses of the term “intuition” or “intuitively” are better interpreted as an unfortunate verbal tic or as a conversational hedge indicating that a claim is just a snap judgment or a bit of pre-theoretic background. What is not true, he claims, is that the judgments have bedrock epistemological status, are considered justified without appeals to experience and without inference, that inclinations to believe these judgments tend to be recalcitrant to further evidence, or that these judgments are based on conceptual competence or have a special phenomenology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Religious conviction enjoys a privileged status in our society.This is perhaps most apparent in legal contexts, where religious conviction is often given special consideration. To be more precise, religious conscience is recognized as a legitimate basis for exemption from standing laws, whereas claims of conscience deriving from non-religious commitments generally are not. Why is this? Is there something special about religiously-based claims of conscience? Is there something special about religion such that it gives rise to claims of conscience that deserve special consideration? If so, what? In his new book, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, 2013) Brian Leiter offers subtle analyses of toleration, conscience, and respect. He argues that religion is indeed to be tolerated, because liberty of conscience is a central moral and political ideal. However, he holds that there’s nothing special about religion that gives special moral or legal weight to the demands it places on the consciences of believers. Contending that all claims of conscience–religious and non-religious–deserve toleration, Leiter argues that legal exemption may be granted on the basis of a claim of conscience–religious or otherwise–only when doing so does not place additional burdens on the non-exempt. 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 experience we look at an object – say, a tomato? A traditional view holds that we entertain an internal picture or representation of the tomato, and moreover that this internal picture is of the surface of the tomato, and not, say, the side of the tomato that is hidden from view. This general view of experience has been criticized for some time by numerous scientists and philosophers, Alva Noe among them. In earlier books, Noe — professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley — has defended the view that our experiences of the world are grounded in practical skills – our abilities to manipulate things, and their availability or accessibility to us. According to this enactive view of perception, the hidden side of the tomato is also in our conscious experience of it – it is, in Noe’s words, present as absent. In his new book, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012), Noe elaborates the enactive view further, to explain the nature of presence and of access: how the world shows up to us in experience, and how the way it shows up depends on our modes of access to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Liberal democracies are in the business of protecting individuals and their rights. Central among these are the rights to free expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience. Liberal democracies are also in the business of sustaining a political environment in which citizens are regarded as political equals. In exercising their rights, some citizens will come to hold beliefs and viewpoints that are fundamentally at odds with the idea that all citizens are their equals. That is, in a free society, some citizens will come to endorse views which reject the idea of a society of free and equal citizens. Such cases seem to put the liberal democratic state in a bind. It must permit citizens to adopt and express illiberal and anti-democratic viewpoints, or else violate its commitment to the core freedoms it prizes. Yet the spread of such viewpoints, and sometimes even their very expression, can threaten the equality other citizens and undermine the stability of a democratic society. What should the state do? In his new book, When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality (Princeton University Press, 2012), Corey Brettschneider proposes a view he calls “value democracy” to address this kind of quandary. He claims that although the democratic state must permit the adoption and expression of even hateful views, it nonetheless can object to and criticize them. That is, Brettschneider makes a case for thinking that the state is permitted to–and in some contexts must–employ its expressive power to combat hateful viewpoints. The book hence addresses fundamental philosophical questions concerning free speech, equality, and the authority of the democratic state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What is the nature of art? The question involves understanding the relation between art and reality and what we are expressing in art. Miguel de Beistegui, professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, addresses these questions in his latest book, Aesthetics after Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (Routledge, 2012). De Beistegui’s framework for understanding art stands in contrast to a metaphysics that posits a sensible world of experience and a supersensible world of forms or essences, in which art – even non-representational and conceptual art, in some cases – exists as a mimetic go-between. De Beistegui suggests instead that art captures an aspect of reality that is literally there – an excess of the sensible, “the hypersensible”, that is typically hidden by our everyday practical ways of interacting with and experiencing reality. Our grasp of these features is metaphorical in that they are shared by things that are usually put in distinct categories, but it is the sensible/supersensible distinction that gives rise to an impoverished notion of metaphor that prompts us to think that what is metaphorical is not literally true. In this richly suggestive and provocative volume, de Beistegui draws on thinkers from Plato and Nietzsche to Merleau-Ponty and Danto, and discusses works by a wide range of artists, including Proust, Holderlin, de Koonig and Chillida, to elaborate his view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Plato famously argued that democracy is nearly the worst form of government because citizens are decidedly unwise. Many styles of democratic theory have tried to meet Plato’s argument by denying that democracy has anything to do with wisdom. Democracy, such views claim, is simply a matter of representing citizens’ preferences in politics, or rather a matter of giving everyone equal input into the decision making process. But even these minimal conceptions of democracy often want to distinguish between “raw” and “enlightened” preferences, thereby smuggling in considerations regarding the wisdom or rationality of democratic citizens. More recent democratic theories have embraced the epistemic aspect of democratic politics, and have tried to show, contra Plato, that citizens are not too unwise for self-government. Some hold that democracy in fact requires very little wisdom, and that citizens generally measure up to democracy’s requirements. Others think that democracy’s epistemic demands are significant, but hold nonetheless that the collective judgment of democracy citizens makes the grade. Democracy, it seems, is intricately entwined with epistemology. In his new book Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press), Jamie Kelly brings empirical results concerning human epistemic abilities to bear on the current field of democracy theory. He argues that our susceptibility to framing effects greatly complicates the story democratic theorists must tell about collective self-government and individual rationality. Kelly thereby provides a much-needed empirical check on the claims democratic theorists make–implicitly or explicitly– about the epistemic powers of citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It’s traditional in Plato scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways. One common division is a temporal one that distinguishes among early, middle and late dialogues. Another is by content: there are the so-called erotic dialogues, which include Symposium, Phaedrus and Alcibiades I, where themes of love and friendship are explicitly treated, and then the rest, which deal with such non-erotic themes as language and knowledge and ontology. Jill Gordon, Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy at Colby College, argues that this second division deeply misinterprets the role of eros in the Platonic corpus. In her new book, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge University Press, 2012), she argues that paradigmatically non-erotic dialogues, such as Theaetetus, Parmenides and Phaedo, are in fact deeply erotic, and that the theme of eros unifies the corpus rather than divides it. For example, the Socratic dialectic, or elenchus, is a give-and-take that is erotic in nature, and doing philosophy itself is an erotic endeavor akin to naked exercise in the gymnasium. Her argument begins with a close reading of Timaeus, Plato’s creation myth, and the role of eros in the immortal human soul, and comes full circle with a reading of Phaedo in which Socrates’ growing rigidity as the hemlock takes hold is an erotic pun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverished. But there’s a question regarding the nature and extent of these obligations. Some hold that well-off societies and their citizens own substantial duties of humanitarian assistance to the global poor. Others claim that our duties are stronger than this; they claim that our duties to the global poor are a matter of justice. In her new book, Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Nicole Hassoun proposes a new kind of argument for what she calls “serious moral duties to the global poor.” She claims that in our globalized world, people all over the globe are subject to the coercive power of international institutions. She then argues that these coercive institutions are legitimate only if they can win the consent of those subject to them. From this, she concludes that international institutions owe to the global poor whatever is required in order to enable them to exercise a kind of minimal autonomy; and this autonomy requires access to food, shelter, water, and education. Hassoun’s argument, then, is that familiar minimal requirements for legitimate coercion entail more extensive positive duties to the global poor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to solve mysterious crimes. But folk psychology is not restricted to genius detectives. We all use it: to predict what a friend will feel when we cancel a date, to explain why a child in a playground is crying, to deceive someone else by saying less than the whole story. Its very ubiquity explains why it is called folk psychology. But how in fact does folk psychology work? On standard views in philosophy and psychology, folk psychology just is the practice of ascribing or attributing beliefs and desires to people for explaining and predicting their behavior. A folk psychologist is someone who has this “theory of mind”. In her new book, Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology (MIT Press, 2012), Kristin Andrews, associate professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, argues that the standard view is far too narrow a construal of what’s going on. It leaves out a wide variety of other mechanisms we use to understand the mental lives of others, and a wide variety of other reasons we have for engaging in this social competence. Moreover, what’s necessary to be a folk psychologist is not a sophisticated metacognitive ability for ascribing beliefs, but an ability to sort the world into agents and non-agents – an ability that greatly expands the class of creatures that can be folk psychologists. Andrews draws on empirical work in psychology and ethology, including her own field work observing wild primates, to critique the standard view and ground her alternative pluralistic view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are marked mainly by the publication of his two major books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). The most common account of Rawls’s intellectual trajectory has it that the later Rawls came to regard the project of A Theory of Justice as deeply flawed. That is, Political Liberalism is often read as an attempt to dial back or even renounce the project of A Theory of Justice. In fact, Political Liberalism is commonly taken to represent a drastic lowering of the ambitions for political philosophy as such. In his book, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (Oxford University Press, 2010), Paul Weithman meticulously develops and defends a non-standard account of Rawls’s turn from the view proposed in A Theory of Justice to that of Political Liberalism. According to Weithman, both works are centrally focused on the very same problem, namely, how a stably just society is possible among creatures like us. Weithman argues that Rawls’s “turn” involves not a change of topic, or a lowering of ambition, but a change in how Rawls understood the nature of social stability. If Weithman is correct, the standard understanding of Rawls’s philosophy must change significantly. Perhaps more importantly, if Weithman is right, many of the most common criticisms of Rawls more obviously miss their mark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy