Interview with Philosophers about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 16 days 22 hours 35 minutes
Rivka Weinberg, “The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May be Permissible” (Oxford UP, 2016)
We don’t commonly think of procreation as a moral issue. But why not? When you think about it, creating another person seems like a morally weighty thing to do. And we tend to think that procreation under certain conditions would be irresponsible,
Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015)
Nothing seems so obviously true as the claim that pains feel bad, that pain and suffering go together. Almost as obviously, it seems that the function of pain is to inform us of tissue damage. In What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain (T...
S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxford UP, 2015)
It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least,
Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 )
Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the phil...
Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World” (Princeton UP, 2015)
We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of try...
Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography” (Harvard UP, 2015)
We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being ir...
Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do.
Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015)
How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighe...
Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015)
There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage?
M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015)
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from...