Episodes

  • M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)

    M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)
    Mar 10 2025
    This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    53 mins
  • Omar Dahbour, "Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis" (Routledge, 2024)

    Omar Dahbour, "Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis" (Routledge, 2024)
    Mar 1 2025
    Part of what makes the challenges that collectively are called the “environmental crisis” so difficult is that the vocabulary we deploy in thinking and discussing the issues emerged under social conditions that are far removed from our present. The familiar idiom of nation states, borders, jurisdiction, and so on seems inadequate for addressing a crisis that concerns global conditions. It’s plausible to think that a cogent response to the environmental crisis will require a reconstruction of the conceptual tools of social and political theory. In his new book, Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis (Routledge 2024), Omar Dahbour develops new understandings of the concepts of sovereignty, territory, peoplehood, and self-determination, all with a view toward building a case for the principle according to which peoples have a right to protect and maintain their natural environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Feb 20 2025
    How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025), William Paris uses the tools of critical theory to draw out the utopian interventions in the works of W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs. Arguing that utopian thinking gives us normative purchase on the problems of our own time, Paris shows not that these historical figures can tell us how or to what end we navigate our current crises. Rather, their insights and failures help us denaturalize our mode of life and develop self-emancipatory practices to realize what is not yet possible under the current conditions of injustice in which we have come to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • David Pitt, "The Quality of Thought" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    David Pitt, "The Quality of Thought" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Feb 13 2025
    The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experience – is a radical position in philosophy of mind. David Pitt is one of its foremost proponents. In The Quality of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pitt provides an extended defense of the position and its implications: if thinking is a kind of experience, then what about unconscious thought, or the idea that explaining thought must rely essentially and primarily on introspection? Pitt, who is a professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, also considers what the sui generis phenomenology of thought might be and explains how thought contents are determined purely internally, challenging today’s dominant views of content determination and the possibility of explaining thought content using naturalistic, non-introspection-based methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • John D. Norton, "The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference" (U Calgary Press, 2024)

    John D. Norton, "The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference" (U Calgary Press, 2024)
    Jan 11 2025
    This book is free to download here. Science depends essentially on inductive inferences – inferences that go beyond the evidence on which they are based. But inductive inferences have historically been modeled on deductive inferences, which are valid if and only if they satisfy a valid argument form. In The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference (BSPS Open/University of Calgary Press), John Norton expands his defense of what he calls the material theory of induction: what makes an induction good is not its conforming to a universal rule, like deduction, but instead by its being warranted by true background facts in a particular domain. Norton – Distinguished Professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh -- argues that while these facts are themselves in turn supported by inductive inferences, the resulting network of inductive support does not suffer from vicious circularity, is not a form of coherentist epistemology, and dissolves the infamous problem of induction articulated most clearly by Hume. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Michael Fuerstein, "Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Michael Fuerstein, "Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jan 1 2025
    Various kind of philosophical considerations have been offered in favor of democracy. By some accounts, democracy realizes some intrinsic value, such as equality or collective autonomy. According to other views, democracy’s value is more instrumental: it tends to produce or promote certain social goods like stability, prosperity, and peace. However, a longstanding alternative tradition locates democracy’s value in its capacity to make social and moral progress. Here, the idea isn’t so much that democracy produces an already-identified social good, but rather that democracy fosters a kind of social and moral discovery. In Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress (Oxford UP, 2024), Michael Fuerstein draws on normative and empirical considerations in proposing a systematic account of democracy’s capacity to foster progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Ege Selin Islekel, "Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

    Ege Selin Islekel, "Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
    Dec 20 2024
    What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones? In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), Ege Selin Islekel creates a South-South dialogue, connecting practices of forced disappearance in Latin America with those in Turkey and the movements of resistance developed by the searchers and remnants. By analyzing methods of power that target death and the afterlives of the dead, Islekel shows that the world is, but need not be, organized by such practices. She shows how people mobilize resistance within the death worlds of necrosovereignty, inventing possibilities from the very stuff of nightmares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Andrea Scarantino, "Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide" (Routledge, 2024)

    Andrea Scarantino, "Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide" (Routledge, 2024)
    Dec 10 2024
    This interview is an exception to our “single author monographs” rule, because the edited collection that is its topic is an intellectual achievement worth making an exception for in over 12 years of New Books in Philosophy podcasts. Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide: Volume I and Volume II (Routledge, 2024) is a two-volume compendium of 62 chapters on emotion theory written by 101 leading theorists from philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, and other fields, all grappling with the question: What is an emotion? Editor Andrea Scarantino, who is a professor of philosophy at George State University, has compiled a synoptic and thematically organized collection that covers the history of emotion theory, the main contemporary theories of emotions, individual chapters on 35 distinct emotions, and more. The volumes bring together theorists from distinct disciplines that don’t normally engage with each others’ work, and provide readers with a one-stop-shop for clearly written introductions to the current states of play in emotion research. Andrea Scarantino is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, where he has taught since 2005. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 hr and 12 mins