New Books in Philosophy – Détails, épisodes et analyse

We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly, this is someone who has been selected by an official process to hold a political office where he or she is tasked with promoting, advocating, and speaking for a constituency. However, we are also familiar with informal representatives: those who speak for a constituency but are not appointed by formal processes. Once again, the idea of an informal political representative is probably familiar: rock stars and other celebrities commonly claim to “speak for” others with respect to distinctively political matters, and they are understood by the public to (informally) represent a constituency. Of course, there are lots of ways in which informal political representation can go wrong. Surprisingly, the topic has not been thoroughly theorized. Until now. In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press 2024), Wendy Salkin develops an intricate framework for thinking about informal political representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its considerations of this question, supporting domination and oppression.  In Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2022), Havis brings our focus to theoretically rich practices of African diasporic communities. Offering critical insight into how philosophy has been narrowed, Havis also offers a guide to interpreting the world otherwise, engaging stories, novels, the blues, jazz, work songs, naming and self-naming, and more. Havis does Black Vernacular Philosophy in conversation with other doers as she shows us the urgent need for such work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo’s hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

At the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of language is a puzzle. First, it seems we don’t need less evidence for a claim that we know something if the practical importance of the knowledge claim shifts. Second, it seems we shouldn’t assert that we know something if we don’t. Third, it seems that if the practical importance of a knowledge claim shifts, we should back up our claim with more evidence. So is knowledge really insensitive to shifts in practical stakes? Or should the knowledge norm of assertion be abandoned?  In Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mona Simion critically considers various types of responses to the Shiftiness Dilemma before defending her own solution. On her view, assertions obey both epistemic and non-epistemic norms, and what is permissible to assert shifts depending on all-things-considered judgments that rely on a contextually determined mix of these norms. Simion, who is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, generalizes her approach to other types of epistemically relevant speech acts, and argues that only moral assertion requires special treatment, due to differences in audience understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian who developed a systematic view of how we construct and experience culture, widely construed to include mathematics, science, religion, myth, art, politics, ethics and other social endeavors. In Cassirer (Routledge 2021), Samantha Matherne explains how Cassirer updates Kant to develop his critical idealism in the form of a distinction between substance and function – the mind-dependent objects we cognize, and the structure of our minds that these objects depend on. He uses this view in his broad philosophy of symbolic forms, unpacking the way we build up the cultural world around us and our lived experience in that cultural world. Matherne, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University, brings Cassirer’s work to life for those beyond his contemporary influences in the metaphysics of science, the philosophy of art, and the insertion of myth into the politics of fascism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We commonly ascribe beliefs and similar attitudes to groups. For instance, we say that a foreign government believes that members of the press are spies, or that a corporation denies that its product is harmful to the environment. Sometimes, it seems that in such cases, we are simply ascribing to the group the shared beliefs of its members. But there are other cases in which it appears we are referencing an independent subject of the belief or attitude – the government or the corporation, over and above its members. Puzzles abound. In The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford 2021), Jennifer Lackey develops a unified account of group belief, justified group belief, group knowledge, and group assertion. Intriguingly, this account serves ultimately to allow us to make sense of group lies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy