To celebrate the wide range of publications produced by members of the Department of Philosophy in the past year (May 2020–May 2021), we highlight on this page the published work of faculty members, students, postdoctoral fellows, and lecturers. Once again, we are extremely proud of the wide range and innovation in the ideas of both junior and senior Philosophy colleagues. Take a look, listen in, and congratulations again to all the authors.
The page is subdivided by books, articles, book chapters, and the latest issue of the department’s undergraduate journal. Items are listed alphabetically by the author’s last name and then alphabetically by title.
Books
Chris Fraser, The Essential Mòzǐ: Ethical, Political, and Dialectical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
The Mòzǐ ranks among the founding texts of the Chinese philosophical tradition, presenting China’s earliest ethical, political, and logical theories. In a new translation informed by traditional and recent scholarship and marked by clarity, Chris Fraser emphasizes the philosophical aspects of Mohists’ writing to allow readers to genuinely enter their world of thought. The book includes the essential political and social topics of import to this essential reform movement.
Jonardon Ganeri, Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and His Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves offers a sustained exploration of the philosophy of self articulated by the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. Doing justice to Pessoa’s breathtaking originality, the book reveals the extraordinary power of Pessoa’s theory by employing it to analyze some of the most puzzling problems about the self to have appeared in the global history of philosophy.
Masaharu Mizumoto, Jonardon Ganeri, and Cliff Goddard, eds., Ethno-epistemology: New Directions for Global Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2020).
Ethno-epistemology features new perspectives on the implications of cross-linguistic and cultural diversity for the field of epistemology. It brings together philosophers, linguists, and scholars working on knowledge traditions to advance work in epistemology that moves beyond the Anglophone sphere. It proffers an essential resource for philosophers working in epistemology and comparative philosophy, as well as for linguists and cultural anthropologists interested in the cultural-linguistic diversity of knowledge traditions.
Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri present a lively introduction to the philosophy of classical India. Classical Indian Philosophy explores the earliest extant literature, the Vedas, and the explanatory works that these inspired, known as the Upaniṣads. They also discuss other famous texts of classical Vedic culture, the explosion of philosophical speculation devoted to foundational texts called sutras, while charting further developments within Buddhism. The authors further focus on the much-debated question of whether Indian philosophy may have influenced ancient Greek philosophy and had an impact on later Western thought.
Lloyd P. Gerson, The Plotinus Reader (Cambridge: Hackett, 2020).
The Plotinus Reader contains a wide range of translations from the fifty-four treatises that make up Plotinus’ Enneads, a key work in the history of philosophy. These translations attempt to provide an accessible yet accurate depiction of Plotinus’ often difficult language, based on the definitive critical edition of the Greek and decades of further textual scrutiny by many academics. There are several references to Plotinus’ sources, as well as numerous cross-references accompanied by a glossary of technical words.
Joseph Heath, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
In his latest, Donner Prize–winning book, Joe Heath seeks to interrogate the traditional model of state power by examining the practice of public administration with regard to normative questions. Heath both provides a corrective to the prevailing tendency to underestimate the contribution of civil servants to the success of liberal-democratic welfare states and suggests a more satisfactory account of the principles implicit in public administration.
Hear Joseph Heath discussing his book at 31:18
Mark Kingwell, The Ethics of Architecture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Taking a wide perspective on ethics, this slender volume examines the breadth of ethical challenges that architects encounter. By bringing usually abstract questions into the realm of physical creation, the book attempts to reformulate “architectural ethics” as a matter of deep reflection on the architect’s role as both citizen and caretaker. Kingwell discusses thinkers and makers ranging from Le Corbusier and Martin Heidegger to Jane Jacobs and John Rawls in the pages of this elegant and accessible work.
Read about the new Oxford series The Ethics of Architecture inaugurated
Mark Kingwell, On Risk (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2020)
The lengthening impact of the global COVID-19 epidemic has rendered everyday risk considerations more important and unavoidable. As many people grapple with the safety of even leaving their homes, or of sustained contact with loved ones, Kingwell offers a deeper consideration of risk itself, posing questions that ultimately point toward philosophical issues of life, death, and danger.
Mark Kingwell talks about On Risk on Open Book
Arthur Ripstein, Rules for Wrongdoers: Law, Morality, War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
The latest book by Killam Prize winner Arthur Ripstein brings together two lectures on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which controls the use of armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth principles controlling the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. Ripstein argues that recognizing both sets of rules as distinctive prohibitions, rather than as permissions, can reconcile the supposed tension between them, and he holds that the law and morality of war in fact align. Rules for Wrongdoers represents a major statement on the ethics of war by one of the most distinguished thinkers in the field.
Read an interview with Arthur Ripstein on Kant and war
Ingrid Stefanovic and Zafar Adeel, eds., Ethical Water Stewardship (Basel: Springer, 2020).
This multidisciplinary book brings together philosophers and non-philosophers to discuss water ethics, specifically how moral problems influence water security decisions at the local, national, and international levels. The notion of water security spans human rights, politics, economics, law, legislation, public health, trade, agriculture, and energy, and refers to the experience of having secure access to clean water. In this book, the ethical dimensions of decision-making at those crossroads are investigated, and real-world examples are used to elicit some critical conclusions.
Sergio Tenenbaum, Rational Powers in Action: Instrumental Rationality and Extended Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Human actions unfold over time, in pursuit of ends not fully specified in advance. Rational Powers in Action locates these features of the human condition at the heart of a new theory of instrumental rationality, uniquely arguing that the deep structure of instrumental rationality can only be understood if we see how it governs the pursuit of long-term, indeterminate ends. Sergio Tenenbaum argues that we must focus on temporal duration and the indeterminacy of ends in intentional activity.
Owen Ware, Fichte’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Owen Ware here develops and defends a fresh interpretation of Fichte’s moral philosophy as an ethics of wholeness. Fichte’s System of Ethics (1798), mostly neglected in the 20th century, is now recognized by scholars as a masterpiece in the history of post-Kantian philosophy, as well as a key text for understanding the work of later German idealist thinkers. Ware’s book provides a careful examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte’s moral philosophy evolved.
Owen Ware, Kant’s Justification of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
In this ground-breaking study of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. What results is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today.
Stefano Bacin and Owen Ware, eds., Fichte’s “System of Ethics”: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
This book brings together an international group of leading scholars on Fichte and is the first of its kind in English to offer critical and interpretive perspectives on his System of Ethics, covering topics such as normativity, belief, justification, desire, duty, and the ethical life. It offers an essential guide for scholars wanting to deepen their understanding of Fichte’s ethical thought, as well as for those interested in the history of ethics more broadly.
Jessica Wilson, Metaphysical Emergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Metaphysical Emergence provides lucid and systematic answers to two core questions: What, precisely, is metaphysical emergence? And, is there any metaphysical emergence, in principle and moreover in fact? Jessica Wilson here argues for the existence of precisely two forms of metaphysical emergence: weak and strong.
Chungmin Lee, Young-Wha Kim, and Byeong-uk Yi, eds., Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (London: Routledge, 2021).
Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions by leading scholars well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. The essays collected provide critical clues and solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions and address ensuing debates.
Articles
George Boys-Stones, “O Πλατωνικὸς θεὸς ὡς πατέρας τοῦ κόσμου” [“Plato’s God as Father of the Cosmos”], Philosophia 49 (2020): 75–87.
Mark Fortney, “Directing Internal Attention to Ongoing Thought,” Consciousness and Cognition 85 (2020).
———, “Evans on Intellectual Attention and Memory Demonstratives,” Analytic Philosophy (March 2021).
Chris Fraser, “Realism about Kinds in Later Mohism,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 20 (2021): 93–114.
Elisa Freschi (with Matteo Pascucci), “Deontic Concepts and Their Clash in Mīmāṃsā: Towards an Interpretation,” Theoria (online first, March 2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12307.
Jonardon Ganeri, “Book Symposium: Attention, Not Self”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101.2 (2020): 470–502.
———(with Jing Huang), “Is This me? A Story about Personal Identity from the Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa/Dà zhìdù lùn,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy (March 2021).
Eliran Haziza, “Assertion, Implicature, and Iterated Knowledge,” Ergo (March 2021).
Thomas Hurka, “The Parallel Goods of Knowledge and Achievement,” Erkenntnis 85 (2020): 589–608.
Griffin Klemick, “C. I. Lewis Was a Foundationalist After All,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 37.1 (2020): 77–99.
Alex Koo, “Logic as a Blended Course,” Teaching Philosophy 43.2 (2020): 139–156.
Felix Lambrecht, Review of Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion (2017), Philosophy in Review 40.3 (2020).
Jennifer Nagel (with Evan Westra), “Mindreading in Conversation,” Cognition 210 (2021): 1–15.
Amy Mullin, “Justice, Autonomy and Care: Symposium on Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency, Care and Justice,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (May 2021).
Daniel Munro, “Remembering the Past and Imagining the Actual,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2021): 175–97.
Owen Pikkert, “The Modal Status of Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7.1 (2021): 40–58.
Rashad Rehman, Review of Josef Pieper’s Don’t Worry about Socrates: Three Plays for Television, Review of Metaphysics 74.4 (2021): 636–38.
———, Review of Josef Pieper’s Rules of the Game in Social Relationships, Review of Metaphysics 74.2 (2020): 400–402.
Dylan Shaul, “Kristeva vis-à-vis Hegel: Forgiveness as Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Absolute Knowing,” Philosophy Today 65.3 (2021): 673–90.
Kwesi Thomas, “Buberian Intersubjectivity and Racist Encounters,” A Priori: The Brown Journal of Philsophy 6 (2021): 57–81.
Jordan Arthur Thomson, “Poverty and the Peril of Particulars,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 37.4 (2020): 661–77.
Mason Westfall, “Other Minds Are Neither Seen Nor Inferred,” Synthese (September 2020).
Book Chapters
George Boys-Stones, “Begotten and Made: Creation as Cosmogony in Middle Platonism,” in Cosmology and Biology in Ancient Philosophy: From Thales to Avicenna, edited by Ricardo Salles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 85–100.
———, “Plutarch’s E at Delphi: The Hypothesis of Platonic Authority,” in Authorities and Authoritative Texts in the Platonist Tradition, edited by Michael Erler, Jan Erik Heβler and Ferderico M. Petrucci (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 149–62.
———, “The Stoics’ Empiricist Model of Divine Thought,” in Cosmology and Biology in Ancient Philosophy: From Thales to Avicenna, edited by Ricardo Salles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 152–71.
Chris Fraser, “Identifying Upward: Political Epistemology in an Early Chinese Political Theory,” in The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, edited by Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ridder (Routledge, 2021), 24–34.
Elisa Freschi, “The Role of Emotions in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta,” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy, edited by Maria Heim, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, and Roy Tzohar (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
———(with Andrew Ollett), “Kumarila Bhatta’s Explanation in Verse,” in Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti, edited by Malcolm C. Keating (London: Bloomsbury 2020), chapter 1.
———, “Prabhākara’s Long Explanation,” in Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti, edited by Malcolm C. Keating (London: Bloomsbury 2020), chapter 2.
———, “Śālikanātha’s Straightforward and Lucid Gloss: Comprehensive Survey of the Epistemic Instruments,” in Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti, edited by Malcolm C. Keating (London: Bloomsbury 2020), chapter 3.
Jonardon Ganeri, “Epistemic Pluralism: From Systems to Stances,” in Ethno-epistemology: New Directions for Global Epistemology, edited by Masaharu Mizumoto, Jonardon Ganeri, and Cliff Goddard (London: Routledge, 2020), 19–42.
Lloyd P. Gerson, “At the Intersection of Cosmology and Biology,” in Cosmology and Biology in Ancient Philosophy: From Thales to Avicenna, edited by Ricardo Salles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
———, “The Perennial Value of Platonism,” in Christian Platonism: A History, edited by Alexander J. B. Hampton and John Peter Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Greg Horne, “Decolonizing Agada’s Consolation Philosophy,” in Fanon Revisited, edited by George J. S. Dei (New York: DIO Press, 2021).
Mark Kingwell, “Are Sentient AIs Persons?” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, edited by Markus D. Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 325–42.
Amy Mullin, “Social Trust and Mistrust of Parental Care,” in Social Trust: Foundational and Philosophical Issues, edited by Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber (London: Routledge, 2021), 200–219.
Jennifer Nagel, “Losing Knowledge by Thinking about Thinking,” in Reasons, Justification and Defeat, edited by Jessica Brown and Mona Simion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 69–92.
———, “The Psychological Dimension of the Lottery Paradox,” in Lotteries, Knowledge and Rational Belief: Essays on the Lottery Paradox,
edited by Igor Douven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 48–73.
Julia Nefsky, “Climate Change and Individual Obligation,” in Philosophy and Climate Change, edited by Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Owen Ware, “Fichte’s Ethical Holism,” in Practical Philosophy from Kant to Hegel: Freedom, Right, and Revolution, edited by James A. Clarke and Gabriel; Gottlieb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 138–56.
Byeong-uk Yi, “Classifiers, Articles, and Bare Nominals,” in Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, edited by Chungmin Lee, Young-Wha Kim, and Byeong-uk Yi (London: Routledge, 2021), 137–71.
———, “Numeral Classifiers and Diversity of Classifier Systems,” in Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, edited by Chungmin Lee, Young-Wha Kim, and Byeong-uk Yi (London: Routledge, 2021), 6–39.
Journals
Under the lead editorship of Julia DaSilva and Layla Pereira DaSilva, the Philosophy Course Union (PCU) published the 21st edition of Noēsis: Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy in August 2020, and under the editorial leadership of Yazmeen Martens and Sanghoon Oh, the 22nd edition of Noēsis in May 2021.
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