David Arndt’s book is an excellent exposition of Arendt’s political thought. Anyone interested in Arendt would benefit from the clear presentation and analysis of the main concepts and ideas Arendt thought through in her writings; the careful distinctions he offers between the meanings Arendt gave to these concepts and the more common understanding of them; and …
I Katrina Forrester’s book is an engaging history of John Rawls’s intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls’s theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls’s …
In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy Read More »
Uwe Steinhoff is an excellent philosopher. He is analytically exacting, wide ranging, and steeped in many of the central debates. He is also an important critic of the dominant strains of discussion within just war theory. Unfortunately, the book does not live up to Steinhoff’s promise as a theorist. Although there are some insightful interventions in …
Self-Defense, Necessity, and Punishment: A Philosophical Analysis Read More »
Philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement have asked how one ought, if at all, to revise one’s beliefs or credences when confronted with facts about others who disagree. For it can seem at first blush that the mere existence of disagreement, at least when it is with those who are roughly one’s peers with …
Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment Read More »
Tom Cochrane’s book forges into the philosophy of emotion on a new and powerful vehicle: the idea of valent representations. His project is ambitious. Cochrane uses valent representations to give models of affect, pleasure and pain, emotion, moods, expressive behavior, social intentionality, norms, collective effervescence, inner speech, sentiments, personality, and character. Philosophers interested in any of these topics …
The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States Read More »
Declan Smithies’ book is an extraordinarily strong contribution to debates in philosophy of mind and epistemology. It is ambitious and expansive in scope while being extremely rigorously argued. It will be required reading for epistemologists, as well as for philosophers of mind interested in the value of consciousness for our lives as thinkers and knowers. …
In this fine collection, Christian Seidel has brought together innovative new work on consequentialism, with a special focus on the theoretical strategy of “consequentializing” agent-centered (deontological) moral theories. It is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to better understand and evaluate the conceptual foundations of consequentialism. Seidel’s introduction is a real strength of the book, …
Joseph C. Pitt’s slim new book argues persuasively that the philosopher’s traditional focus on theories as the essence of science is misplaced. This kind of objection is frequently leveled at philosophers by historians and those in science studies, and for good reason. Pitt’s critique is much broader and more interesting than the typical one since …
Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change Read More »
In the introduction to the book, Sarah McGrath explains her key aims. She has an overall working hypothesis: moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge, and our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our …
When you were born into the world, you began with a basic repertoire of sensory-perceptual experiences representing the world around you. On the basis of those experiences, you acquired beliefs and desires about things in your environment. Then you learned a language and became able to think about a great many things far outside of …