philopapers

Interest in Hegel’s Idealism has surged over the past thirty years and shows no sign of slowing. It is increasingly commonplace to view Hegel’s significance as more than mere esotericism in the history of philosophy and sociology. The interpretive camps defining this resurgence are multifarious, but one variation has gained particular traction. Broadly, this interpretive …

Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic Read More »

Pyrrhonian skepticism’s influence on, or relevance to, modern and contemporary epistemology cannot, I think, be overstated. Suffice it to consider the problem of conflicting appearances, the problem of the criterion of truth, the problem of the regress of justification, the epistemic significance of disagreement, and the nature and aim of inquiry and its connection with …

Epistemology After Sextus Empiricus Read More »

Jacqueline Broad has produced a terrific volume and an invaluable resource for scholars and students. The volume showcases a large selection of letters in which four women philosophers of the early modern period — Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet — exchange views with a number of their prominent philosophical, …

Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence Read More »

Samuel Fleischacker’s book is a very welcome addition both to scholarship on Adam Smith and to the burgeoning field of empathy studies. Fleischacker brings decades of excellent and influential work on Smith to the popular topic of empathy to show that Smithian empathy (Smith uses the term “sympathy” for this capacity), with some updates, has a …

Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy Read More »

In the United States, a comprehensive immigration reform bill was passed by the Senate in 2013, but eventually failed in the House. This bill was structured around a compromise — increased border security measures were to be exchanged for immigration amnesty for undocumented migrants currently inside the US. Many centrist politicians (including those in the …

Justice, Migration, and Mercy Read More »

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 …

Arendt on the Political Read More »

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 »