Podcast
New Books in Philosophy
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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21episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)
Apr 1000:55:36Tap to summarizeThe cybernetic tradition in cognitive science analyzes the purposive behavior of many complex systems – from sensory-guided missiles to sensory-guided animals -- in terms of feedback control that maintains stability in the face of external perturbation. A more recent extension and elaboration of this framework brings in predictive processing and the minimization of free energy – essentially, minimizing getting inputs that conflict with what the system expects. In A Drive to Survive: the Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life (MIT Press, 2025), Kathryn Nave argues that this framework is inadequate for explaining living organisms, which are not merely complex but inherently unstable and continually producing themselves through metabolism. Nave, who is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, defends a bioenactivist view of living organisms in which the chemical and energetic constraints involved in having a metabolism are essential for understanding their actions, in contrast to the “sensor-guided movementism” of the FEP framework. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Andrew Lister, "Justice and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Apr 501:11:30Tap to summarizeAndrew Lister's Justice and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justice as fairness." Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn't explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory. The book's main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty, but a limiting condition on other duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explains how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice: productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. Lister ultimately shows that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, the book rehabilitates reciprocity for egalitarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Catherine Elgin, "Epistemic Ecology" (MIT Press, 2025)
Mar 301:00:22Tap to summarizeHumans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In Epistemic Ecology (MIT Press, 2025), Catherine Elgin develops a model in which individuals learn to rely on communal epistemic resources, such as communally-endorsed standards for correcting ourselves, and in turn contribute to those resources through active epistemic agency. In this way, she shows how epistemic autonomy and epistemic interdependence are mutually reinforcing rather than in tension. Elgin, who is professor of philosophy of education at Harvard University, also distinguishes between belief, which entails truth, and acceptance, an active epistemic attitude that constitutively involves reflection and assessment. This capacity for reflection is learned, but we use it widely – in sports bars, for example, just as much as in academic contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
Feb 1800:59:04Tap to summarizeWhat happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophically? What can Baldwin help us understand and do now? In So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2025), John Drabinski takes up this project to give a sustained philosophical reading of Baldwin’s nonfiction. Drabinski does so to understand the event of Baldwin’s contributions in the context of the Black Atlantic. Baldwin was a thinker who looked to the United States, even when in exile. But he was also in the broader context of the mid-twentieth century Black Atlantic, of which he was surely aware but wrote little—what if we read for what was absent from Baldwin’s texts? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Feb 1001:08:51Tap to summarizeWhile we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are inadequate for making these distinctions in general. If a starfish can literally split itself in two and each half regenerates into a new starfish, why hold that there was just one starfish to begin with rather than many? In The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology (Oxford UP, 2025), Ellen Clarke defends the idea of evolutionary individuals: units created and maintained by mechanisms that ensure the parts share a common fate. Such individuals enable good evolutionary bookkeeping, in particular our ability to predict which variations in these individuals will enable natural selection to occur. Clarke, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds, considers the merits of her view in relation to alternatives, how her view explains the emergence of new levels of biological individuality, and how the need for idealization and scientific choice of individual boundaries can avoid conventionalism about biological individuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Feb 101:01:48Tap to summarize“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding that justice requires that political, social, and economic inequalities be minimized as much as possible. The standard approach to liberal egalitarian theorizing, influenced greatly by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), is to specify a set of normative principles to guide the design and functioning of society’s primary institutions (its “basic structure”). In The Anatomy of Justice: On the Shape, Substance, and Power of Liberal Egalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2024), Gina Schouten argues for a reorientation in liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice. She proposes that, instead of prescriptive principles, we should instead think of a liberal egalitarian theory’s most important product to be “evaluative discernment”: theorizing should aim to discern those achievements or values the realization of which would make society more just overall. Schouten offers a weighted specification of the values of justice, what she calls “the anatomy of justice.” The anatomy of justice is deployed by Schouten to help resolve difficulties internal to liberal egalitarianism, in part by deflating longstanding debates, like that regarding whether equality is fundamentally a distributive or a relational value. The anatomy of justice is also used by Schouten to provide systematic and compelling guidance for addressing existing injustices and to defend liberalism from criticisms from the left. The book thus aims to demonstrate the vitality and relevance of feminist liberal egalitarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Jan 1001:00:58Tap to summarizeHow do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structure when they observed Franklin’s image 51, or how did Hodgkin and Huxley reason that sodium ions carried the current flowing into the membrane of a voltage-clamped giant squid axon? In Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A granular approach (Cambridge University Press), Kenneth Aizawa argues for an account of such reasoning as singular compositional abduction: explaining particular experimental results in terms of lower-level entities, such as the bonds between nucleotides or the positive charges of sodium ions. Aizawa, who is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University—Newark, draws on close examination of scientific practice to argue that dominant views in philosophy of science regarding abduction do not capture what scientists are actually doing. Instead, he articulates compositional abduction as a specific form of inferential practice in science distinct from eliminating alternative hypotheses, employing hypothetical-deductive confirmation, or identifying mechanism components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)
Dec 1601:16:41Tap to summarizeHow can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2025), Mariana Ortega focuses on photography using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative practices of primarily Latinx artists. Moving from the ocular to the mouthly, Ortega opens up possibilities for being affected by art. She also shows how artists use aesthetic practices to transform themselves, the possibilities for life, and as means to refuse to forget the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Amie Thomasson, "Rethinking Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Nov 1001:03:17Tap to summarizeThe word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about the subject matter of metaphysics? According to Amie Thomasson, very clearly no. In her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Thomasson argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that our concepts all function the same way – for example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truthmakers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, when each of these discourses have different aims. Thomasson, who is Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering – of figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt, particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo-problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Transcribe →Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Oct 2001:10:04Tap to summarizeHow should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demine of the Modern Moral Self (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Ladelle McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy of the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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