Épisodes

  • Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Oct 20 2025
    How 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 10 min
  • S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)

    S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)
    Oct 10 2025
    Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was guaranteed by the way we are built biologically – and it can no longer be taken for granted. In Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law (Routledge, 2025) S. Orestis Palermos considers the ethical and legal implications of the extended mind thesis – the idea that information-processing technologies are not merely tools but literal parts of our minds. While this thesis remains controversial, there is little doubt that technological devices can push information that coheres in an integrated way with your thoughts – for example, when your phone presents photographs of last year’s holiday on today’s anniversary. Such mind extensions create new vulnerabilities to invasions of mental privacy, freedom of thought, and protection from personal assault. Palermos, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Ioannina, articulates these new problems and explores what levels of protection we should adopt in the face of them, up to the point of making it technologically impossible to access or manipulate your extended mental contents.  S. Orestis Palermos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Ioannina, in Greece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 1 min
  • Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)

    Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)
    Sep 10 2025
    Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many social scientists, social institutions are sets of rules about how to act, though theories differ about what the rules are, how they are established and maintained, and what makes some social institutions stable through social change and others more transient. In Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences (Springer, 2025), Armin Schulz defends a version of the general view that social institutions have functions, drawing on a concept of function from evolutionary biology. On his view, the function of a social institution is not a matter of its history, but those features that explain its ability to survive and thrive in the here and now. Schulz, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas, also uses this account to provide an explanation of what institutional corruption amounts to, and to analyze current debates between shareholder vs. stakeholder views of the function of a corporation. This book is available open access here Armin W. Schulz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 5 min
  • Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)

    Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)
    Aug 20 2025
    Why do so many philosophers value anarchy but refuse to call themselves anarchists? Why don’t philosophers draw on the classical anarchist tradition? How can we think de facto anarchism as distinct from dawning anarchism? What is at stake in doing so? Does philosophy need anarchism? To answer these questions, in Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity Books, 2023), Catherine Malabou reads submerged counter-revolutionary themes in the texts of several key philosophical thinkers. By doing so, Malabou helps us understand the ways in which philosophy has left anarchy unthought, while also stealing from it, and disavowing it. What emerges in her analysis is the importance of the non-governable, not just as a problem for philosophy, but as what opens towards other ways of sharing, acting, and thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    47 min
  • Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Aug 10 2025
    The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we think about yesterday’s tennis final, or Aristotle, or unicorns. Naturalizing mental content has usually meant explaining how this is possible in terms that eliminate the mystery while retaining commitment to a substantive relationship between mind and world that undergirds this ability. In Deflating Mental Representation (MIT Press), Frances Egan argues that we should give up this commitment in favor of a naturalistic account that treats attributions of content as abstract glosses of neural mechanisms. According to Egan, who is emeritus professor of philosophy at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, representational glosses play ineliminable roles in commonsense psychology and our explanations of human behavior, but they should not be taken literally. Egan forcefully challenges many leading theories of mental representation, making her book a must-read for those interested in the concept of mental representation in the cognitive sciences. Deflating Mental Representation is available open-access and free here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 2 min
  • Sabrina L. Hom, "Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity" (Lexington Books, 2025)

    Sabrina L. Hom, "Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity" (Lexington Books, 2025)
    Jun 15 2025
    What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to the narratives and actions of people who identify as mixed race not just interrupt these dominant narratives, but change our understandings of ancestry, race, sexuality, and much more? In Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity (Lexington Books, 2025), Sabrina L. Hom tackles these questions to argue for the view that many mixed race people have taken up their positioning within and between racial groups in critical and transformative ways. If we disrupt the dominant tropes of objectifying mixed race people, Hom shows us, to attend to what they say and do, we can find a critical standpoint that adds much to our thinking about and collective action in regards to kinship, embodiment, and identity. Sabrina L. Hom is associate professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty of women's and gender studies at Georgia College and State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 27 min
  • Şerife Tekin, "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science" (Routledge, 2025)

    Şerife Tekin, "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science" (Routledge, 2025)
    Jun 10 2025
    Psychiatry’s quest for credibility as a scientific discipline led it to adopt a disorder-label orientation in which mental conditions are categorized in terms of measurable behavioral criteria. In Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering personal narrative for a humanist science (Routledge, 2025) Şerife Tekin offers an alternative framework that decenters the label and recenters the self. Tekin argues that how patients try to make sense of their experiences through self-narratives – including self-diagnosed labels – is an essential source of information for tailoring treatment. Tekin, who is associate professor of philosophy at State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University, proposes the Multitudinous Self (MuSe) model for integrating the patient’s self-perspective back into the psychiatric picture and helping psychiatry itself embrace a more sophisticated notion of scientific objectivity. 25EFLY2 valid 1st April 2025 - 30th September 2025 25EFLY3 valid 1st July 2025 - 31st December 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 4 min
  • Uljana Feest, "Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Uljana Feest, "Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    May 10 2025
    About 100 years ago, prominent psychologists Stanley Smith Stevens, Edward Tolman and Clark Hull spearheaded the idea of linking psychological concepts, such as “memory”, to specific experimental designs. In Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Uljana Feest offers a rich analysis of this link as a method for making progress in epistemically uncharted scientific territory. Feest, a professor of philosophy at Leibniz University in Germany, considers the conceptual, epistemic, and methodological issues involved when it is not clear what a target of research is like or even whether it exists. She provides an updated interpretation of what operational definitions are and how they function in psychology, and shows how these foundational issues in psychology intersect with philosophical debates about conceptual change, natural kinds, and mechanistic explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
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    1 h et 3 min