New Books in Philosophy

The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth, or as an exegesis of rabbinical texts. In The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Harvard University Press, 2013), Josef Stern provides an entirely distinct reading of this singular work. Stern, William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, argues that for Maimonides, reason and religion are just one domain, not two that need to be reconciled; that biblical parable is a literary device used to articulate our incomplete understanding of truths about general welfare and individual happiness; and that Maimonides is primarily motivated by the question of what the best attainable human life can be given our embodied nature. The Guide is in effect a primer that trains the reader to tease apart the multiple meanings of biblical texts – even though these exercises will not yield knowledge of metaphysics and cosmology, including knowledge of God. Stern combines deep familiarity with Maimonides, his works, and his intellectual environment with expertise in contemporary philosophy of language in this major contribution to historical-philosophical scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The trolley problem is a staple of contemporary moral philosophy.  It centers around two scenarios involving a runaway trolley.  In the first, a trolley is barreling down a track without any brakes; off in the distance five people are tied to the track.  If you do nothing, they will be killed by the trolley.  But you can flip a switch, thereby turning the trolley onto a spur, where there is only one person tied.  In this case, most people claim that one should indeed save the five by turning the trolley, even though this means that the one will be killed. But consider the second case, which is like the first but for this difference: there is no spur onto which one could turn the trolley, but one could push a fat man onto the track whose size is sufficient to stop the trolley from killing the five.  Again: Should you push the fat man, thereby saving five lives at the expense of one? Here, most people’s intuition flips: You may not push the fat man.  But why not?  What is the difference between the first and second cases?  This is the question at the core of trolleyology.  And philosophers have explored the complexities of these (and many, many other) trolley scenarios for several decades running. In his new book, Would You Kill the Fat Man? (Princeton University Press, 2014), David Edmonds tells the story of trolleyology, bringing into focus all of the crucial philosophical distinctions that must be made if we are to understand it and canvassing the related empirical literature about real-time moral decision-making.  This book is a work of rigorous philosophy that is also widely accessible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period. 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 assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who must leave.  But even supposing that there is such a right, we may ask the decidedly moral question about how it may be exercised.  And this query calls us to try to bring our views about the ethics of immigration into equilibrium with our other moral convictions about citizenship, liberty, and equality.   Can our common views and practices concerning immigration be rendered consistent with these deeper commitments? In The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), Joseph Carens argues that our common commitment to democratic principles requires us to revise much of our thinking about immigration.  Beginning with the uncontroversial practice of granting citizenship immediately to those born within a country’s territory, Carens argues that claims to social membership and thus to citizenship strengthen as individuals stay in a state; consequently, there is a point at which not extending citizenship to those living within a state’s borders is grossly immoral, even for those who have settled without the state’s permission.  Carens’ arguments about the moral constraints on the state’s rights to exclude eventuate in an argument in favor of open borders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and observed the result. The model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be: it would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Weisberg examines the nature, development and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at concrete models (such as the Bay Area model), computational models and mathematical models to argue for a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures, and their relation to the part of the world they model is in terms of weighted feature-mapping. His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Philosopher Michael Huemer discusses the puzzling idea of political authority, arguing that it does not exist. He explores the concepts of authority, coercion, and obedience, challenging the moral standing of the state. The conversation also touches on anarchism, social contract theory, and the psychology of obedience to authority figures.

Art and ethics are linked philosophically by the fact that they are both fall under value theory; and some aestheticians, notably Berys Gaut, have argued for a direct connection between aesthetic and moral values, in that the moral values that an artwork may embody can raise or lower its aesthetic value. In Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2013), Jennifer A. McMahon argues that aesthetic and moral judgments are intrinsically linked by the fact that they contain a common element of community-calibrated subjective responses, and that as a result by reflecting on art we also exercise this element of moral judgment. McMahon, who is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, draws on Kant, pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, contemporary philosophers of mind such as Susanna Siegel, and interviews with contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson and Doris Salcedo, to argue for and illustrate her view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Our moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past. But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm. That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our present would not be. How is this mixture of regret and affirmation to be understood? In his new book, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford University Press, 2013), R. Jay Wallace explores the complicated dynamic surrounding regret and affirmation. He develops a view that reconciles the apparent contradiction between regretting something that was a necessary antecedent to some attachment that one must now affirm. But in laying out this reconciliation, Wallace uncovers a pervasive and disconcerting truth about the human condition, namely that we must affirm aspects of our lives that are undeniably the products of highly objectionable features of the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Muhammad Ali Khalidi, associate professor of philosophy at York University, argues for what he calls an “epistemic” view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues. On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially-constructed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We’re all familiar with the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a formidable anti-democratic argument: Only truth or wisdom confer authority, and since democracy is the rule of the unwise, it has no authority.  This rough line of argument has proven so formidable, in fact, that many democratic theorists have tried to evade it by explicitly denying that politics has anything to do with wisdom.  But another strand of democratic theory takes the argument by the horns and tries to show that democracy is indeed epistemically sound.  Some of these views try to show that democracy, warts and all, is yet wiser than the alternatives.  But others have proposed a more ambitious reply according to which democracy has a positive epistemic value. In her new book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), Helene Landemore pursues this more ambitious path.  She argues that empirical data pertaining to the epistemic significance of cognitive diversity shows that democracy is uniquely placed to supply distinctive epistemic goods.  Along the way, she explores a range of current findings regarding the “wisdom of crowds”  and also engages core issues at the heart of normative political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy