New Books in Philosophy

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 depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania. In Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2027),  Dan Degerman argues for the need to consider silence in mental disorders in a nuanced way that recogni...

What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relationships. In Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences(Oxford UP, 2026), Robert Wilson proposes an alternative view that does not separate kin relations from biological facts about reproduction that are universally known, such as the fact that ...

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 central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the heart of his account is the phenomenon of legiti...

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 question has been all but ignored in philosophy of language. In this book, Cohnitz and Haukioja address this issue and argue that just as in metasemantics, both internalist and externalist answers are available for this foundational question.

The authors i...

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 functioning of the whole. There are competing organism concepts even today, but the 18th century was a critical period in which thinkers gradually shed prior ideas of life in terms of a body with a principle of spontaneous motion, a body as a mer...

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 question—many more than once. Granted, you're more likely to worry about the point of life when things are not going well, but you're also likely to still ask this question when you've finally received that promotion, achieved a goal, or raised your ...

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 but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the Américas (U Texas P...

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 James on Mind and Action (Oxford UP, 2025), Alexander Klein elaborates James’ theory of the evolutionary function of consciousness and how conscious states are always linked to the body and always trigger bodily motion (from physiological...

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 feedback control that maintains stability in the face of external perturbation. A more recent extension and elaboration of this framework brings in predictive processing and the minimization of free energy – essentially, minimizing getting inputs th...

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 fairness." Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn't explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory. The book's main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is ...

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 Elgin develops a model in which individuals learn to rely on communal epistemic resources, such as communally-endorsed standards for correcting ourselves, and in turn contribute to those resources through active epistemic agency. In this way, s...

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 can Baldwin help us understand and do now? In So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2025), John Drabinski takes up this project to give a sustained philosophical reading of Baldwin’s nonfiction. Drabins...

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 another are inadequate for making these distinctions in general. If a starfish can literally split itself in two and each half regenerates into a new starfish, why hold that there was just one starfish to begin with rather than many? InThe Units of ...

“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 requires that political, social, and economic inequalities be minimized as much as possible. The standard approach to liberal egalitarian theorizing, influenced greatly by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice&nbs...

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 they observed Franklin’s image 51, or how did Hodgkin and Huxley reason that sodium ions carried the current flowing into the membrane of a voltage-clamped giant squid axon? In Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A granular app...

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? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2025), Mariana Ortega focuses on photography using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative p...

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 the subject matter of metaphysics? According to Amie Thomasson, very clearly no. In her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Thomasson argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that ou...

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 ...

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 &...