In his new contribution to the Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair introduces readers to a tradition often ignored by contemporary philosophers. While simultaneously arguing for the fecundity of Sikh categories and concepts from a philosophical vantage point, Mandair scrutinizes the characterization of Sikh ideas as unified -ism, also problematizing the philosophy/religion divide. And, at the same time as he tracks the historical and intellectual development of Sikh philosophy, examining the reasons for its marginalization, he introduces readers to the main contours of its epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind, and ethics, in particular bioethics.Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art (Princeton University Press, 2022), Michael Gill shows how Shaftesbury’s efforts to work on himself resulted in his becoming one of the first philosophers writing in English to develop an aesthetic theory. Shaftesbury conceived of beauty as order or harmony exemplified by wild nature just as it is created by God, in sharp contrast to the prevailing seventeenth-century European view that nature was sinful and needed to be altered for human purposes before it could be aesthetically valuable. Gill, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, explains how Shaftesbury argued for seeing our lives as works of art, and how he responded to critics who claimed that admiring beauty was something only rich lords like himself could afford to do. Instead, Shaftesbury claimed, even the “lowly mechanic” is inherently invested in good craftsmanship and in making himself a good person.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

For a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic because we have no way of judging whether we are getting at that truth. In his new book, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022), Chang argues that we should understand scientific inquiry and its epistemic fruits in terms of what we do to acquire, justify, and use scientific knowledge. Drawing on Dewey and other pragmatists, plus a neo-Kantian view of phenomena, Chang – who is Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge – affirms the basic realist commitment to a mind-independent world, though only in the sense that the world is “mind-framed” by our concepts, not “mind-controlled”. The aim of science, however, is operationally coherent active knowledge, not description of some inaccessible reality.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that exacerbate existing global inequalities. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, even if adhered to, may not be sufficient. The situation seems hopeless.However, in Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (Oxford UP, 2022), Darrel Moellendorf argues that there not only is reason to hope that we might successfully address the climate crisis, but also reason to mobilize hope – to act now in ways that can forge the kind of global solidarity necessary to meet the challenge of climate change.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning: The Doctrine of upādhi in the Upādhidarpaṇa (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation of this anonymous Navya-Nyāya treatise predating Gaṅgeśa. Eberhard Guhe’s book includes a translation as well as an introduction to the important idea of upādhi, which vitiates inferential reasoning. (Suppose smoke accompanies fire only when the fuel being burnt is wet. This fact would be an upādhi for the inference “There is smoke on the mountain because there is fire on the mountain,” since smoke’s existence doesn’t guarantee fire.) In his quest to define the upādhi as a vitiator of inferential reasoning, the author of the Upādhidarpaṇa takes a controversial position on self-dependence, that the general defining characteristic of an upādhi is property of itself, which Guhe explicates as a non-wellfounded property concept. Beyond the English translation and edition of the Sanskrit text, An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning introduces readers to the basics of Nyāya epistemology and logic, beginning with the idea of inference in early texts and moving through more sophisticated reconstructions by comparison with enumerative induction and set-theoretic approaches to logic.Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Social scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving or medical procedures. In Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tiger Roholt discusses a distinct type of distraction: when smartphone use interferes with our active engagement with meaningful experiences, such as dinner with friends or a musical performance or gardening. In these cases, Roholt argues, we risk stunting the experiences that would otherwise give meaning to our lives, or even missing out on discovering new types of meaningful experiences. Roholt, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Montclair State University, draws on writings from John Dewey, Susan Wolf, Albert Borgmann and others in this engagingly written meditation on how ubiquitous uses of smartphones and wearable technologies affects our lives in ways that other types of interruptions do not.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Author Karen Frost-Arnold discusses the ethical and epistemological challenges of the internet, including fake news and online deception. She explores the psychological impact on content moderators and the complexities of imposters online. The podcast delves into the importance of trust, objectivity, and combatting fake news through ethical online behavior.

The grief we feel when someone close to us dies is characterized by a complex and profound experience of loss. But what is this experience? In Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022), Matthew Ratcliffe articulates a common structure to grief experiences even while emphasizing that each person’s experience is highly individual. In his account, we live in experiential worlds structured by valued possibilities and anticipations that are integral to our identities as persons, and in grief we experience a disruption or undermining of these networks of significant possibilities and anticipations. His analysis draws on personal testimonies of grief experiences gathered in a public survey along with philosophical work from analytic and phenomenological traditions. Ratcliffe, who is professor of philosophy at the University of York, also examines the bodily phenomenology of grief, the ways we transition to post-bereavement worlds, and the ways in which continuing bonds with the deceased, and the pre-bereavement world, can be adaptive.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it is deployed frequently and in different contexts. For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions, and biased people. But we also talk about bias as a feature of certain frames of mind, habits, dispositions, and mental processes. In most of these contexts, bias is seen as a kind of failing or a bad-making feature. Attributions of bias are hence often accusatory, or at least a matter of negative assessment.Although these phenomena are familiar, questions remain. Is bias is a single thing? Is bias always bad? Is bias always misleading? Can bias be eliminated? In Bias: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 2023), Thomas Kelly addresses a broad range of such questions. He develops a norm-theoretic account of what bias is, and then explores its implications.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Buddhists are famous for their thesis that selves do not exist. But if they are right, what would that thesis mean for our apparent sense of self and for ordinary practices involving selves—or at least persons? In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha answers these questions by considering Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selves as well as persons and should take a strongly illusionist stance about our apparent senses of agency and ownership. The book also investigates how Vasubandhu ought to explain episodic memory and synchronic unity of conscious experiences without a self. Chadha weaves together philosophers from a range of traditions, drawing on contemporary and premodern interpreters of Buddhism as well as analytic philosophy, phenomenology and continental philosophy, and modern cognitive science.Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy