In Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020), Amy Reed-Sandoval reframes the question of immigration justice by focusing on the historical development and lived experiences of socially undocumented identity. Drawing on ethnography, phenomenological analysis, storytelling, and a non-ideal theory approach, she tracks the development of racialized, class-based, and gendered elements of socially undocumented identity and the unjust constraints that target this identity. She looks at concrete steps for how to address socially undocumented oppression, not just at the level of immigration policy, but also through the work of non-state actors and the socially undocumented themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Philosophy

Amy Reed-Sandoval, "Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice" (Oxford UP, 2020)

What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scientific proposition we can’t elaborate or do anything with? In Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge University Press 2017), Kareem Khalifa argues for a revised version of a traditional view whereby understanding is a function of knowledge of an explanation. In his updated version, understanding admits of degrees, starting from minimal understanding. We improve our understanding by grasping more features in an explanatory nexus by considering plausible alternative explanations, comparing them and rejecting some, and committing to those that remain. Khalifa, who is professor of philosophy at Middlebury College, considers how his view compares with contemporary alternatives defended by Stephen Grimm, Duncan Pritchard, and others, including whether understanding requires some kind of special ability and what understanding adds in value to knowledge and explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the publication of the ​Black Notebooks​, private journals he kept throughout the last several decades of his life. In his new book Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Richard Polt starts by taking a close look at his ​Being and Time (1927), followed by a close analysis of his philosophical development in the 1930’s. He shows through a close textual analysis that Heidegger’s political engagement stemmed from certain philosophical commitments and errors. The book then ends with an attempt to see what, if anything, can be salvaged from Heidegger’s philosophy for political thinking. Richard Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, and is the author of, among other things, ​Heidegger: An Introduction and ​The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy.​ He is co-editor with Gregory Fried of the book series New Heidegger Research, and together they have translated a number of Heidegger’s lectures including ​Introduction to Metaphysics,​ ​Nature, History, State​, and ​Being and Truth​. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Polt, "Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)

It is tempting to hold that any proposed principle of social justice is defective if it demands too much of people, given their proclivities. A stronger view, one that many philosophers find attractive, has it that there is something about the concept of justice that makes it the kind of thing that must be kept “down to earth,” and within our reach. A range of conceptual and methodological issues quickly emerge once we begin wondering whether this kind of deference to the realistic and feasible is warranted. The series of contemporary disputes characterized as the “ideal/non-ideal theory debate” fit this mold. In his new book, Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2020), David Estlund explores the question of whether proposed principles of justice are defective strictly in virtue of being unrealistic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Estlund, "Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy" (Princeton UP, 2020)

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexamining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and in conversation with Judith Butler, María Lugones, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Through developing a feminist phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjectivity. By focusing our attention on temporality, Burke deepens our understanding of how the past haunts the present, giving rise to sexual domination, as well as how we can actualize latent possibilities to lay those ghosts to rest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Burke, "When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

If you thought Jacques Lacan’s essay on "Logical Time" was the psychoanalyst’s final word on the subject, then this interview has a lot to teach you! In his new book Subjectivity In-Between Times: Exploring the Notion of Time in Lacan's Work (Palgrave, 2019), emerging scholar of psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy Chenyang Wang offers the first systematic analysis of the notion of time in Lacan’s work. Wang, based in East China Normal University, begins by telling us about the state of psychoanalysis in China, before offering a fascinating exploration of how Lacan enables us to radically rethink the past, present, and future. Wang’s approach challenges us to think beyond a linear approach to time and a reductive focus early childhood, rigorously theorising the interrelation of social, bodily, egoic, and unsymbolisable aspects of temporal subjectivity. Toward the end of the interview we focus on Wang’s innovative temporal re-reading of sexual difference, which generously responds to queer and social constructionist challenges to psychoanalysis. This interview is the first in my new series on Psychoanalysis and Time, produced in collaboration with Waiting Times, a multidisciplinary research project on the temporalities of healthcare. Waiting Times is supported by The Wellcome Trust [205400/A/16/Z], and takes places across Birkbeck (University of London) and the University of Exeter. Learn more about the project by visiting www.whatareyouwaitingfor.org.uk, or follow us on twitter @WhatisWaiting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chenyang Wang, "Subjectivity In-Between Times: Exploring the Notion of Time in Lacan's Work" (Palgrave, 2019)

Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the disposition to dissolve in water, and this disposition is understood as a real causal power of salt. In Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Travis Dumsday articulates a novel version of dispositionalism – nomic dispositionalism – and considers its relation to a cross-section of fundamental debates and positions in the metaphysics of science, such as nature of scientific laws, the possibility of knowledge about unobservable entities, and whether there is any fundamental material stuff. Dumsday, who is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University of Edmonton, provides a concise and easily accessible introduction to many of these core debates in the metaphysics of science as well as a defense of his intriguing new view of dispositionalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

It is obvious that in our day-to-day lives, a lot hangs on trust, and thus on whether those around us are trustworthy. Yet there are several philosophical issues surrounding trust and trustworthiness. For example, is trusting someone different from relying on them? Correspondingly, is being trustworthy different from being reliable? Assuming that there is a difference, in what does the difference consist? What renders one worthy of trust? Is our trustworthiness something under our control? In How to Be Trustworthy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Katherine Hawley explores many of the central questions one might ask about trust and trustworthiness, proposing an account according to which being trustworthy is a matter of avoiding unfulfilled commitment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine Hawley, "How to Be Trustworthy" (Oxford UP, 2019)

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

In 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome ​Less Than Nothing​, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation ​Absolute Recoil​ in 2014. The works contained his usual use of movie-references, historical and political events and jokes to engage in some substantial philosophical formulations, particularly in dialogue with Hegel and Lacan. In these books, Žižek forged a new developed a number of innovative approaches to various philosophical questions, from quantum mechanics to contemporary political movements. Adrian Johnston’s most recent book on Žižek, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism​ (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces a number of these various developments in detail, salvaging the key philosophical themes while also offering several criticisms and developments of his own. Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor in and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and is a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. His many books include ​Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity​ (2008) and ​Badiou, ​Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009)​. With Slavoj ​Žižek and Todd McGowan, he is a co-editor of the book series ​Diaeresis​, all from Northwestern University Press. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adrian Johnston, "A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism" (Columbia UP, 2018)

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one’s wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, theorizing freedom in negative and positive terms can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward. Maria Dimova-Cookson is Associate Professor in Politics at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK. Yorgos Giannakopoulos (@giannako) is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019)

Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains. J. J. Gibson, a founder ecological psychology, coined the term “affordance” to express a core concept of the view: as embodied, situated organisms we do not simply perceive objects, such as a chair or a tree, but rather we perceive the object as something that is sit-on-able or climbable. In The Philosophy of Affordances (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Manuel Heras Escribano elaborates this idea of affordances as directly perceived possibilities for action available to us in an environment. Heras Escribano, a research fellow at the University of the Basque Country, considers the relation of affordances to values, the type of ecological information we perceive, the nature of agency from the ecological psychological perspective, and a political dimension to affordances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Manuel Heras Escribano, "The Philosophy of Affordances" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1859 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholarship has experienced a mini-renaissance in the last thirty years in the English speaking world, knowledge of Cohen, his scholarship on Kant, his activity in the Jewish community, and his battle against anti-semitism in Germany has remained largely confined to academic Jewish studies. Fortunately Beiser’s new book Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford UP, 2018) commands a broader audience with much to offer historians, philosophers, theologians in addition to Jewish thinkers. In the course of this NBN conversation, Professor Beiser and Avi Bernstein, Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis University discuss Cohen’s • Lifelong quest for a “religion of reason” • Effort to “rescue” Kant from psychologists who had misunderstood him • Hostility to Spinoza • Interest in infinitesimally small quantities • Left-of-center Wilhelmine politics • System of philosophy • Unrequited love affair with German culture • Ontological argumentation for God Cohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism is left largely unremarked in Beiser’s book, as the author freely admits. With humility Beiser calls on his colleagues in Jewish Studies to go more deeply than he into this “masterpiece” of Cohen’s dotage, for in his estimation the Religion of Reason contains arguments for the idea of God that remain worthy of readers even today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frederick Beiser, "Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography" (Oxford UP, 2018)

The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work? In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019), John Danaher explores the issues facing us as we confront our own obsolescence. He defends the idea that a workless future is not only possible, but possibly utopian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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New Books in Philosophy

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