New Books in Philosophy

What does a Bengali intellectual and poet have in common with a British-Austrian logician and philosopher? In Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford University Press, 2021), Priyambada Sarkar explores the shared fascination both of these figures have with the limitations of language, the nature of the ineffable, and the role of poetry in our appreciatin both. While we know that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein read Tagore’s works to the Vienna Circle, Sarkar goes beyond this and other biographical anecdotes to demonstrate the depth of his interest in Tagore and the resonance between their approaches to language. She argues that while philosophers, according to early Wittgenstein, should maintain silence about certain domains, this does not extend to the poet or the artist, who is able to show, indirectly, what is beyond the threshold of language: the ethical, the religious, and the aesthetic. Tagore’s works themselves not only exemplify this capacity, but reflect on this possibility itself, and it is for this reason, Sarkar explains, that they are fruitfully read alongside of the Tractatus.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy 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 (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

“One should really only do philosophy as poetry.” What could Ludwig Wittgenstein have meant by this? What was the context for this odd remark? In Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry (MIT Press, 2021), James Klagge provides a perspective on Wittgenstein as a person and how his life intersected with his work, in particular in the transition from his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the later Philosophical Investigations. Based on private notebooks and memoirs by some of Wittgenstein’s students, Klagge, a professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, sees Wittgenstein’s interactions with his students as gradually prodding him to come grips with the problem of how to influence the frames of mind that people take to philosophical problems. Poetry, along with parables, similes, and other imaginative presentations, exemplify a way of addressing these non-cognitive attitudes – and Wittgenstein conceded that he was not entirely successful in his efforts.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 enterprise of Western epistemology has largely been devoted to a collection of issues concerning the definition and analysis of knowledge. What makes knowledge different from true belief? When is one’s evidence or justification for one’s belief sufficient for knowledge? When must we revise our beliefs? What methods or processes can be relied on for forming rational beliefs? These endeavors typically aspire to defeat skepticism. Yet they often fall flat. In response, contemporary epistemologists have developed different ways of recasting the epistemological enterprise. But many of these provoke new versions of the old difficulties.In Learning from our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World (Oxford University Press 2021), William Talbott proposes a more radical shift in our approach to epistemology. He proposes that we abandon the thought that rational belief should be cast as a successful proof. Instead, we should think of rational belief on the model of a good learner.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

What happens when we take children seriously as philosophical thinkers? What if we try to hear them about topics such as climate change, solitude, and the meaning of friendship? In Seen and Not Heard: Why Children's Voices Matter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Jana Mohr Lone engages with the voices of many children in philosophical conversation to learn not only what they think, but also what hearing children can make possible for our shared world. Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What are the proper things for a philosopher to worry about? And who should be able to worry about them? These two questions, raised in the context of the disruptions and horrors of World War II, animate Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Doubleday, 2022). The book interweaves the biographies and philosophies of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, who met as students at Oxford as World War II left the old men, refugees, women, and conscientious objectors behind to bloom intellectually while most of the men were away. Each argued, in her own way, for a view of human life as necessarily concerned with metaphysical issues and moral approaches that then-ascendant logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy tried to dismiss as mere nonsense. Authors Clare Mac Cumhaill (assistant professor of philosophy at Durham University) and Rachael Wiseman (senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Liverpool) bring Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch to life in this highly readable account, sparked by a series of interviews with the elderly Midgley as the last survivor of the group.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

According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive for revenge or a naïve commitment to cosmic justice. Anger is said to involve a corruption of the person – it “eats away” at them, or plunges them into madness.Maybe anger has been under-appreciated. Perhaps we have failed to make the right distinctions between different varieties of anger – thereby overlooking kinds that are productive and appropriate. In The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press 2021), Myisha Cherry argues that we need to give anger a chance. After identifying distinct forms of anger, she defends a kind of anger she calls Lordean Rage, which she argues is central to antiracist social progress.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

In Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Garfield argues that Buddhist ethics is a distinctive kind of moral phenomenology whose ethical focus is not primarily cultivation of virtues or the achievement of certain consequences. Rather, its goal is for moral agents to shift a non-egocentric attitude about the world from recognizing its interdependence, impermanence, and lack of any essential selves. He makes this argument through investigation into a number of Buddhist thinkers, attending to both pre-modern and modern texts whose genres range from narrative to the more straightforwardly philosophical. While Buddhist Ethics is written for philosophers trained in the broadly “Western” traditions, and therefore engages with ethical literature from Ancient Greece to early modern Europe to the present day, the work’s goal is primarily to show what is characteristic of Buddhist ethics as a historical and also living philosophical tradition.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy 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 (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

How do we reason about causal relationships, how do we determine what the causal relatiomships in nature are, and how are these two things – causal cognition and causation – connected? In Causation With a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2021), James Woodward synthesizes the normative and descriptive aspects of reasoning about causation in a way that combines a minimal realism about causal relations with the ways in which creatures like us think about and investigate these relations. While the descriptive (how we do reason) and the normative (how we ought to reason) are distinct, Woodward – Distingushed Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh – argues that normativity is built into our theories of causation, and armchair philosophical analysis, experimental philosophy, and cognitive psychology all provide different kinds of information about our causal reasoning and the worldly infrastructure that enables causal interventions based on that reasoning to be successful.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

In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they’ll typically have to make a moral decision about whether the identity of the donor will be available to the resulting person. This quickly raises additional moral and even existential questions about the value of knowing about the circumstances of our own conception.In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford UP, 2021) Daniel Groll argues that because donor-conceived persons are likely to develop a significant and worthwhile interest in knowing the identity of their genetic progenitor, their intended parents have an obligation to use a non-anonymous donor.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

Probably the most well-known Chinese philosopher around the world is Kongzi, typically called by his Latinized name, “Confucius.” And yet he did not write a single book. Rather, his students collected Kongzi’s life and teachings into the Analects, a text which has become immensely influential from ancient Confucian traditions up to the current day. In The Analects: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2021), Erin M. Cline argues that we should understand the Analects not only as a guide for living, or a philosophical set of sayings on ethics, but as a sacred text. She argues that this approach helps us reflect more critically about the categories like the sacred, and to appreciate the role of Kongzi as a personal exemplar in the text. Engaging closely with the text of the Analects as well as traditional commentaries and contemporary scholarship, Cline introduces the reader to the history of this text as well its major themes, such as ritual, filial piety, and the relationship between the ordinary and the sacred. By situating the Analects alongside works such as the Nichomachean Ethics and the Bible, her work investigates the text from both philosophical and religious perspectives, while reflecting on these categories themselves.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy 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 (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy