New Books in Philosophy

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops in specific ways in all humans given the appropriate (usually acoustic) inputs. The end result is someone who speaks a natural language – such as English –and has reliable intuitions about what can and cannot correctly be said in that natural language. Peter Ludlow, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, examines a variety of controversial themes related to this model in his new book, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2011). What is the nature of this universal capacity for language, and how is it related to the natural languages that we come to speak? What sort of evidence can intuitions about what we can and can’t say provide about the underlying rules for generating meaningful sounds, especially when we have no conscious access to them? Does it make sense to think that this grammar provides normative guidance for our linguistic behavior when we don’t know what it is? Ludlow suggests provocative answers to these questions and more in this ground-breaking book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The quip reveals an interesting dimension of democracy: it’s hard to beat, but it’s also hard to love. Democracy is hard to love because it sometimes requires us to acquiesce and live by decisions, rules, and laws that we oppose. In fact, democracy sometimes requires us to accept political outcomes that we take to be demonstrably sub-optimal, mistaken, and even unjust. In short, when democracy decides, even those in the minority are required to comply. And those who refuse or fail to comply can be forced into compliance. This is what we mean when we talk about the legitimacy of democratic governance: democratically-produced collective decisions place a moral claim even on those who disagree, and the democratic state may enforce compliance with such results. But democratic legitimacy is philosophically puzzling. It seems that the fact that a given outcome gained the support of a majority provides a very weak reason for compliance among those in the minority. Contemporary democratic theorists have thus turned to the idea of public deliberation as a necessary element of democratic legitimacy. Deliberative democrats hold that voting must be preceded by open processes of public deliberation. This reason-recognizing element is supposed to explain both the bindingness of democratic outcomes and the permissibility of the use of force to gain compliance. In Democratic Legitimacy (Routledge, 2011), Fabienne Peter explores the philosophical problems associated with democracy and deploys a series of compelling criticisms of standard accounts of legitimacy. She then develops an original and fascinating version of deliberative democracy, once which combines epistemic and procedural considerations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Love – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go ’round, and all you need is love. But what sort of experience is loving? What more can we say about it that will illuminate the kind of experience it is? In his thought-provoking new book, Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011), Troy Jollimore, Professor of Philosophy at California State University at Chico, argues that love is a matter of vision in that it literally transforms the eyes – it is an emotion that is partly but essentially characterized by the special kind of visual experience that it brings about. This visual-experiential view of love makes love a kind of emotion that is partly responsive to reasons and to the claims of morality. To Jollimore – who is also an award-winning poet – we do love for reasons, that is, because we see that the beloved has certain valuable features. But the rationalism of love seems to conflict with other features it also has. For example, if Brad loves Angelina because she possesses some set of features, then isn’t he rationally obligated to love anyone who has those features, and rationally obligated to stop loving her if she loses any or all of those features? If he did either of those things, it would seem that he did not really love Angelina. Love as a visual-experiential phenomenon also raises special epistemic and moral problems. If love’s vision makes us blind to the flaws of the beloved, doesn’t that violate basic epistemic norms under which we are supposed to seek the truth as best we can? If love’s vision is a kind of tunnel vision in which the beloved is the center of our universe, aren’t we apt to ignore the legitimate moral claims on us of other persons? Jollimore considers these and other curious aspects of love as he explains his intriguing view in this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

It is commonly held that citizens in a democratic society have a civic duty to participate in the processes of collective self-government. Often, this duty is held to be satisfied by voting. In fact, the sentiment is commonly expressed that voting is always a good thing for citizens to do, no matter how they vote. Similarly, it is widely held that when citizens neglect to vote they violate a civic duty, no matter how uninformed or misguided their votes would have been. These popular pieties about voting are, at the very least, philosophically suspicious. In voting, citizens perform a collective action that impacts the lives of others for better or worse; voting thus seems to be the kind of act that can be performed well or badly. Indeed, it seems that there should be circumstances under which it would be wrong for some individual to vote. In The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011), Jason Brennan presents a provocative case for thinking that citizens who choose to vote have a duty to vote well. He then argues that voting well is difficult, and concludes that not only is there not a strong duty to vote, but, for many citizens, there is a duty not to vote. Importantly, Brennan takes his view about voting to be fully and enthusiastically democratic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not real can cause emotional responses as if they were real? Why do we experience the adrenalin rush and the racing pulse of fear when we know very well that Hannibal Lector is just a character on the screen? How can an aversive experience be aesthetically valuable? How can something that repels be aesthetically attractive? These paradoxes of fiction and aversion arise in spades when it comes to the emotion of disgust. In this podcast, we talk with Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, about her new book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor Korsmeyer discusses the nature of disgust as an emotion, the aesthetic allure of the disgusting, and the kind of aesthetic experience that we get in disgusting art. Do we really feel disgust when we confront this art, or must our disgust be denatured in some way before we can regard the object aesthetically? How can the disgusting also be attractive? What does disgust add to aesthetic experience that other emotional responses don’t? Korsmeyer claims that disgust is more varied than we tend to think, that it has certain features that overcome the problem of fiction and aversion, and that successful works of art that aim to evoke disgust elicit a special kind of aesthetic response, the sublate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Demographic data show that the United States is a heavily segregated society, especially when it comes to relations among African-Americans and whites. The de facto segregation that prevails in the US is easily shown to produce grave and systematic disadvantage for African-Americans. The degree and extent of this segregation is difficult to explain in the morally innocent terms of individual choice and personal responsibility. Furthermore, the disadvantages that result are not adequately addressed by standing government policies aimed at anti-discrimination and the redistribution of social goods. In The Imperative of Integration (Princeton University Press, 2010), Elizabeth Anderson makes a compelling case for thinking that de facto segregation is a failure of democracy. And the failure is twofold: first, a de facto segregated society fails African-Americans in denying them full and equal democratic membership; second, de facto segregation fails democracy in that it loses the positive social goods that emerge from the integration of diverse perspectives and experiences. She presents a rigorous argument for thinking that integration across racial and other social dimensions is a requirement for a democratic society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to have a structured format analogous to the structure that sentences have in natural languages. That is, according to Fodor, we must think in a Language of Thought, sometimes also called Mentalese. Classical computationalism has always had its critics – most notably connectionist or neural-network models, which involve a more brain-like computing system consisting just of simple nodes and their connections, without any obvious internal structure at all. But since 1975 Fodor has argued that the computational model couldn’t explain key features and kinds of reasoning, like making plans for the future or making decisions quickly. And he has also argued against the idea that neuroscience had anything critical to do with understanding the mind. In short, Fodor himself helped undermine the dominance of the classical computational model that he played such an important role in founding. Professor Susan Schneider, a doctoral student of Fodor’s who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, hopes to revitalize the LOT model in her new book, The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction (MIT Press, 2011). Professor Schneider argues that LOT has suffered because it was underdeveloped in critical ways; in this interview, she talks about how the classical computational model can be modified to remain a vital contender in contemporary cognitive science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access. What is the nature of this reliance? Do testifiers simply provide us with especially compelling evidence? Should we regard the testimony of others as only so much more local data in our cognitive environment? Or is there a deeper sense in which much of our knowledge depends on others? In his new book, Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2010), Sanford Goldberg argues for the striking thesis that in cases of testimonial knowledge, part of our justification in believing another’s testimony resides in the mind/brain of the testifier. This thesis runs counter to what Goldberg regards as a widespread and insufficiently examined premise at the heart of most views in contemporary epistemology, namely, individualism, which is the view that a believer’s justification never extends outside of the believer’s mind/brain. Goldberg argues that, over a significant range of cases, a believer’s justification depends upon irreducibly social factors, and thus that an individual’s justification sometimes resides in part in the cognitive processes of others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

If we are to have a society at all, it seems that we must recognize and abide by certain rules concerning our interactions with others. And in recognizing such rules, we must take ourselves to sometimes be authorized to hold others accountable to them. Perhaps it is also the case that we must recognize that states have the authority to enforce the rules. It has long been the aim of liberal democratic political theory to show that there is a form of social authority which is consistent with the intrinsic freedom and moral equality of all persons. Of course, there is plenty of room for skepticism. In fact, the skepticism goes back at least to Plato’s Republic: Maybe all social norms, all moral prescriptions, and all political rules are simply cases of some (the powerful, the clever, or the experts) pushing others around? In his new book, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Gerald Gaus attempts to dispel the skepticism. Drawing upon empirical and conceptual considerations from a wide range of disciplines, Gaus argues that social rules and the authority to enforce them emerge out of everyday social interactions and are supported by healthy emotional and dispositional states. We treat each other as free and equal moral persons when we recognize only those social rules which each individual has reason to accept and internalize. In this way, authority is consistent with the freedom and equality of all because properly exercised authority is always aimed at reminding individuals what they already have moral reasons to do. If Gaus is right, The Order of Public Reason solves a long-standing and fundamental problem of moral and political philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy