New Books Network Podcast

Philosophy February 1, 2023

A Realistic Blacktopia

Why We Must Unite to Fight

Derrick Darby

Hosted by Robert Talisse

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls …

Philosophy January 20, 2023

Side Affects

On Being Trans and Feeling Bad

Hil Malatino

Hosted by Sarah Tyson

Fatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of …

Philosophy January 12, 2023

After Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions

Oana Serban

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also …

Philosophy December 30, 2022

The Idea of Prison Abolition

Tommie Shelby

Hosted by Robert Talisse

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons …

Philosophy December 10, 2022

Interdisciplinarity in the Making

Models and Methods in Frontier Science

Nancy J. Nersessian

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists …

Philosophy December 1, 2022

Legitimate Opposition

Alexander Kirshner

Hosted by Robert Talisse

The idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent …

Philosophy November 21, 2022

The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita

Selected Metaphysical Chapters

Charles Goodman

Hosted by Malcolm Keating

The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has …

Philosophy November 10, 2022

Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity

Tristan Grøtvedt Haze

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to …

Philosophy November 1, 2022

Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability

Saba Bazargan-Forward

Hosted by Robert Talisse

We often find ourselves acting in concert with others, where what we do together goes beyond the causal contribution of any single participant. When a collection of individuals works together …

Philosophy October 20, 2022

Cross-Cultural Existentialism

On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought

Leah Kalmanson

Hosted by Malcolm Keating

Does human existence have a meaning? If so, is that meaning found in the world outside of us, or is it something we bring to our experience? In Cross-Cultural Existentialism …

Philosophy October 10, 2022

Bad Beliefs

Why They Happen to Good People

Neil Levy

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to …

Philosophy October 3, 2022

Making Space for Justice

Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope

Michele Moody-Adams

Hosted by Robert Talisse

A standard way of proceeding in political philosophy is to start with some form of conceptual inquiry: we first try to figure out what justice, equality, and freedom are and …

Philosophy September 20, 2022

Queering Philosophy

Kim Q. Hall

Hosted by Sarah Tyson

Why isn’t there a queer subfield in philosophy? How has institutionalized philosophy continued to develop without a recognized specialization in queer philosophy? What would it mean to care queerly for …

Philosophy September 1, 2022

The Problem of Blame

Making Sense of Moral Anger

Kelly McCormick

Hosted by Robert Talisse

Blame seems both morally necessary and morally dicey. Necessary, because it appears to be a central part of holding others to account for wrongdoing. Dicey, because – in its standard …

Philosophy August 19, 2022

African Philosophy

Emancipation and Practice

Pascah Mungwini

Hosted by Malcolm Keating

In African Philosophy: Emancipation and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), Pascah Mungwini considers the history of African philosophy in relationship to world philosophies. Arguing for the importance of African philosophy to know …

Philosophy August 10, 2022

The Art of Abduction

Igor Douven

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

How should we form new beliefs? In particular, what inferential strategies are epistemically justified for forming new beliefs? Nowadays the dominant theory is Bayesianism, whereby we ought to reason in …

Philosophy August 1, 2022

Spying Through a Glass Darkly

The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence

Cécile Fabre

Hosted by Robert Talisse

On its face, spying and counter-intelligence activities seem morally suspect. They tend to involve sneaking, deceiving, and manipulating, as well as various forms of betrayal, treachery, and disloyalty. Yet intelligence …

Philosophy July 20, 2022

Animal Crisis

A New Critical Theory

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen

Hosted by Sarah Tyson

As we lose more individual animals and entire species to catastrophic climate change, habitat destruction, toxic dumping, and other human activities, it becomes increasingly difficult to register the full scope …

Philosophy July 11, 2022

Perspectival Realism

Michela Massimi

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. In Perspectival Realism (Oxford University Press, 2022) …

Philosophy July 1, 2022

On Believing

Being Right in a World of Possibilities

David Hunter

Hosted by Robert Talisse

According to many standard philosophical accounts, beliefs are a kind of stance one takes toward a proposition. To believe that Nashville is in Tennessee is to adopt a certain attitude …