Faculty members of the Department of Philosophy published an impressive number of academic books in the past few months, ranging in topic from race and utopia, Romantic mythology, and the role of water in our psychological ecosystem. Be sure to stop by the display in the department hallway to browse these new and some older titles in person, or take a look at the updated list below. Congratulations to our faculty on their research and success!
- Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation by William M. Paris (Oxford, 2025)
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- Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation argues that racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time, and utopia has historically responded to this domination. It provides a theoretical account of utopia as the critical analysis of the sources of time domination and the struggle to create emancipatory forms of life. Rather than focusing on inclusion and equality before the law, as found in liberal theories of racial injustice, Race, Time, and Utopia analyzes the neglected “utopian” tradition of emancipation in black political thought that insists freedom can only be secured through the transformation of how we organize social time.
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- In this podcast on the New Books Network, Sarah Tyson interviews William M. Paris, discussing how time figures into racial domination.
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- Why It’s OK to Be Amoral by Ronald De Sousa (Routledge, 2025)
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- Why It’s OK to Be Amoral asserts that self-righteous moralism has replaced religion as a source of embattled and gratuitous certainties. High-minded moral convictions may invoke the authority of sacred moral truths, but De Sousa says that there are no such truths. Instead, moral passions are rooted in atavistic emotional dispositions and arbitrary social conventions.
- Return of the Gods: Mythology in Romantic Philosophy and Literature by Owen Ware (Oxford, 2024)
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- Return of the Gods investigates the Romantics’ practices of reinterpreting old myths and inventing new ones. This wide-ranging study combines history, philosophy, and literary criticism to argue that the Romantics turned to mythology for its potential to transform how we see ourselves, others, and the world.
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- Ware elucidates the themes of his book in a blog post hosted on the Oxford University Press website.
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- Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self by Jonardon Ganeri (Oxford, 2024).
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- Imagination and the Self draws connections between Fernando Pessoa and earlier philosophical poets–from Keats to Shakespeare to Coleridge to Whitman. It emphasizes Pessoa’s theory of the human subject as a radical departure from the history of Christian or Islamic thought, highlighting an affinity with philosophical fiction in classical India by examining Pessoa’s engagement with Indian prose and poetry.
- Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024)
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- Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras. Their responses to Indian thought may affect our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza.
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- Ware explores the philosophy of yoga in Germany as part of a series of podcasts on German Philosophy and the World, recorded for the September 2024 Congress of the German Society of Philosophy.
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- In this podcast on the New Books Network, Malcolm Keating interviews Owen Ware, discussing German responses to Indian thought in the era after Kant.
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- Elementals, Vol. 3: Water, edited by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic (Centre for Humans and Nature, 2024)
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- Elementals is a five-volume collection of essays, poetry, and stories that explores the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, and mind and the material world. Water, Vol.3 is the third in this series, centered around how people are working with, adapting to, and cocreating relational depth and ecological diversity by attending to the aquatic forces that shape our everyday life. Proceeds from sales of Elementals benefit the nonprofit organization Center for Humans & Nature.
- The Fundamentals of Reasons by Nathan Howard and Mark Schroeder (Oxford, 2024)
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- The Fundamentals of Reasons offers an introduction to contemporary discussions of normative reasons in philosophy. Focusing on the twin roles of reasons in explanation and deliberation, the book not only emphasizes what has made reasons central across philosophy but it also explores why philosophers might have such incompatible pictures about what reasons are and how they work.
- The Geography of Taste, edited by Dominic McIver Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay (Oxford, 2024)
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- Aesthetic and artistic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. In this collaborative work, four philosophers attempt to reconceive the philosophy of art and aesthetics by taking aesthetic diversity and cultural specificity, rather than universality, as the starting points of inquiry.
