Congratulations to Franz Huber and Cheryl Misak on the publication of their latest books.
- Huber‘s Causality, Counterfactuals, and Belief: More Means-End Philosophy just appeared with Oxford University Press. The work offers a novel approach to metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and philosophical logic by exploring means-end derivations of the logics of default conditionals and counterfactuals, modal idealism about possible worlds, and the royal rule, a normative principle relating descriptive normality to conditional belief. Distinct in its unifying methodological approach, Huber’s exploration of means-end philosophy–alongside a critical discussion of the use of intuition in philosophy–posits the discipline as both serious and normative, arguing that philosophical problems are deeply intertwined with one other. It explains the importance of logic to philosophy without identifying logic as a technical theory in itself.
- Margaret Macdonald and Analytic Philosophy in the 1930s: Unpublished Letters with Biographical and Interpretive Essays (Oxford, 2025), by Michael Kremer and Misak, explores the important but until recently sidelined work of the British analytic philosopher Margaret Macdonald through previously unpublished letters written between 1932 and 1937. The letters shed light on the cultural, social, and political situation in Britain in the 1930s and its impact on academic life, revealing that, against the mighty obstacles stacked against them, some women in English philosophy before World War II managed to carve out paths as professional philosophers. Misak and Kremer complement Macdonald’s letters with a biographical essay, a transcription of a no-longer accessible paper on Peirce, an essay on Macdonald as a scholar of pragmatism, and an essay on her as a scholar of Wittgenstein. Look for a separate piece here on this book and its authors in the coming weeks.
