This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Latest episodes
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59 min
Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation with Dan Degerman (Routledge, 2026)
Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life – for example, when we are silenced – as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of d…
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1 h 06
Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)
What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relatio…
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1 h 10
Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)
What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relatio…
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1 h 00
Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers cen…
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1 h 05
Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Metasemantics studies the foundations of meaning, asking what makes it the case that certain words have the meanings that they do. But what makes metasemantic theories true? This q…
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1 h 11
Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledg…
Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific contributions to the development and fun…
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48 min
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (…
You can stock your life with important work, relationships, activities, and art, and yet, you can still ask: what's the point of it all? Almost every thinking person has had that q…
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1 h 11
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)
How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality bu…
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1 h 02
Alexander Klein, "Consciousness is Motor: William James on Mind and Action" (Oxford UP, 2025)
When it comes to consciousness, William James is well-known for his descriptions of it rather than his theory of it and its relation to the body. In Consciousness is Motor: William…
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52 min
Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)
The cybernetic tradition in cognitive science analyzes the purposive behavior of many complex systems – from sensory-guided missiles to sensory-guided animals -- in terms of feedba…
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1 h 07
Andrew Lister, "Justice and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Andrew Lister's Justice and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justice as fair…
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57 min
Catherine Elgin, "Epistemic Ecology" (MIT Press, 2025)
Humans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In Epistemic Ecology (MIT Press, 2025), Catherine…
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55 min
John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophically? What…
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1 h 05
Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from anothe…
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58 min
Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding that justice…
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57 min
Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 20…
How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structure when th…
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1 h 12
Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)
How can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs?…
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1 h 01
Amie Thomasson, "Rethinking Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about th…
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1 h 08
Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 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 (Unive…
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57 min
S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 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 b…