New Books in Philosophy

How can we think together multiplicity and agency? How can we resist oppression and build transformative political coalitions while attending to the ambivalences and incommensurabilities born of the collective conditions for action, meaning making, and self-understanding? In Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance (SUNY Press, 2021), Andrea J. Pitts engages the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and her many readers to give us a framework for consistently returning to these questions as central to struggle for collective flourishing. As part of asking these questions, Pitts delves into critiques arising from disability, critical trans, and Indigenous studies and activism. Pitts provokes us to think ever anew about what is possible between us. 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

There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humanities at the University of California – Santa Cruz, shows how “pernicious reification” – taking the map or model for what it represents -- can arise in science, and he argues for a form of pluralism about our understanding of the world, called contextual objectivity, that lies between realism and constructivism. The maps and drawings filling the book highlight Winther’s discussion and illustrate the power that maps and theories have to shape the way we think about the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We often talk as if individuals have entitlements to certain kinds of information: medical test results, political representatives’ voting records, crime statistics, and the like. We also talk as if these entitlements entail duties on the part of others to provide the relevant information. Moreover, we talk as if the individual’s entitlement to information also entails a range of protections against misinformation, deception, and the like.Despite the fact that these ideas are common, there is surprisingly little in the philosophical literature about the nature and contours of the relevant entitlements. In her new book, The Right to Know: Epistemic Rights and Why We Need Them (Routledge, 2021), Lani Watson seeks to remedy this. She develops a conception of epistemic rights – a distinct class entitlements which nonetheless fits neatly into the existing landscape of rights theory. 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

How can Buddhism and feminism be brought together in a constructive way to challenge patriarchial structures? What could such a philosophy say about anger over injustice and oppression? In Buddhist Feminism: Transforming Anger Against Patriarchy (Palgrave, 2020), Sokthan Yeng answers these questions. She argues that, despite Buddhist institutions themselves being susceptible to feminist critiques, there are fruitful ways of reading Buddhist philosophy and practices that contribute to feminist goals. By examining a range of Buddhisms, Theravada and Mahāyāna, around the world and from different historical periods, Yeng argues that a Buddhist feminism would involve relationality, attention to the body, and the call to recognize anger. To make the case, her book engages with contemporary feminists who are Buddhist, such as bell hooks, Luce Irigay, and Jan Willis, as well as the writings of premodern Buddhist nuns, the Therīgātha.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

Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since the inception of QM about how, exactly, we should understand what it tells us about reality. In The World in the Wave Function (Oxford UP, 2021), Alyssa Ney defends wave function realism, the claim that the basic representation in QM, the wavefunction, corresponds to a field in a high-dimensional space, and that this field and its space is the fundamental reality. Ney, a leading philosopher of physics and metaphysics at the University of California at Davis, defends this controversial view by explaining how the particles of classical mechanics and the ordinary objects of familiar 3D space can plausibly arise from it. Ney makes the complications of QM accessible to non-physicists, and clearly explains the motivations for her view, the opposing positions, and the challenges that face any interpretation of the ontological implications of quantum mechanics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Discussions of the ethics and politics of immigration tend to focus on those seeking entry into a new society. We ask whether a country has the “right to exclude” those who want to relocate within it. We explore the moral implications of more-or-less restrictive immigration policies, often with a view towards the plight of immigrants and refugees.These are of course important questions, but in his new book, Immigration and Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2021) Chandran Kukathas argues that a state’s immigration policies also exert control over its domestic population. He asks whether this exercise of power is justifiable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What can debt reveal to us about coloniality and its undoing? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Rocío Zambrana theorizes the way debt has been used as a technique of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, producing profit from death on the island. With close attention to the material practices of protestors who have fought that destruction of life for the purposes of profit, Zambrana argues that decolonization entails political-economic subversion and transformative interruption of the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that fuel and are sustained by colonization. She shows us how organizing pessimism nourishes hope.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

Mona Simion, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow and author of "Shifty Speech and Independent Thought," delves into the fascinating intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of language. She explores how knowledge claims shift with practical stakes and the tension between epistemic and non-epistemic norms. Simion analyzes confidence in assertions, particularly in high-stakes situations, and emphasizes the unique treatment of moral assertions. Her insights challenge traditional views on evidence and decision-making, offering a fresh perspective on knowledge and assertions.

According to an intuitive view, those who commit crimes are justifiably subject to punishment. Depending on the severity of the wrongdoing constitutive of the crime, punishment can be severe: incarceration, confinement, depravation, and so on. The common thought is that in committing serious crimes, persons render themselves deserving of punishment by the State. Punishment, then, is simply a matter of giving offenders their just deserts. Call this broad view retributivism. What if retributivism’s underlying idea of desert is fundamentally confused? What if persons lack the kind of free will that would make them deserving of punishment in the sense that retributivism requires?This is the central question of Gregg Caruso’s new book, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (Cambridge, 2021). After arguing against the idea that persons can be deserving of punishment in the retributivist’s sense, Caruso develops an alternative approach to criminal behavior that he called the Public-Health Quarantine Model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), not only brings together his wide-ranging research from the past three decades, but brings together Indian philosophers with analytic philosophers in an extended reflection on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language. He takes up these topics under the three broad categories of objects, subjects, and other subjects, investigating where arguments for the existence of ordinary objects might lead us: towards accepting the reality and perceptibility of universals and the existence of immaterial yet embodied selves. Chakrabarti’s arguments engage with well-known analytic thinkers like Russell, Strawson, and Dummett, along with well-known Indian thinkers like Śaṅkara, Nāgārjuna, and Uddyotakara, though always for the purpose of philosophical progress, not mere comparison or historical exegesis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy