Every year, the Department of Philosophy hosts a Book Launch and Spring Party to celebrate major publications by faculty members, bring closure to one academic year, and welcome the possibilities of a new one. In 2020, things have turned out a little different—but that doesn’t mean we cannot acknowledge the extensive academic output by members of the department.

This page aims to highlight and celebrate the publications in the past academic year (2019–2020) not only of faculty members but also of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and lecturers. We are extremely proud of the thoughtful, wide-ranging work both junior and senior Philosophy colleagues have brought into the world. Take a look, listen in, and congratulations again to all the authors.

The page is subdivided by books, articles, book chapters, and other publications like interviews 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

Jacco Bomhoff, David Dyzenhaus, and Thomas Poole, eds., The Double-Facing Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Constitutional and legal theory often marginalize supposedly external elements, such as norms originating in other legal systems, the movement of individuals across borders, or the application of domestic law to foreign affairs. By contrast, The Double-Facing Constitution places these instances of boundary crossing at the heart of an alternative understanding of constitutions, showing how constitutional orders face both inward and outward, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by their exteriors.

Lloyd P. Gerson, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

This third volume of an innovative account of Platonism, the central tradition in the history of philosophy, examines it vis-à-vis Naturalism, the “anti-Platonism” in antiquity and contemporary philosophy. Platonism and Naturalism provides strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history and concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism remain unstable and likely indefensible.

Paul W. Gooch, Course Correction: A Map for the Distracted University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

Course Correction engages in deliberation about what the twenty-first-century university needs to do to regain its focus as a protected place for unfettered commitment to knowledge, not just as a space for creating employment or economic prosperity. The volume raises three important questions about the contemporary university. In discussing the dominant attention to student experience, it asks, “Is it now all about students?” Second, it examines the question, “What knowledge should undergraduates gain?” And finally, asking “What and where are well-placed universities?” the book makes the case against placeless education offered in the digital world, in favour of education that takes account of its place in time and space.

Listen to Paul Gooch discuss this book and the role of the contemporary university with Steve Paik on TVO’s The Agenda.

Thomas Hurka, ed., Games, Sports, and Play: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

This collection presents new philosophical essays on a topic oft neglected in recent philosophy: games, sports, and play. Some contributions address conceptual questions about what games and sports have in common and how that distinguishes them from other activities; other essays discuss normative issues that arise in games and sports. Games, Sports, and Play also includes a posthumous essay by Bernard Suits.

Mark Kingwell, Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analyses of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Steering clear of moralizing, the tome in accessible language takes seriously the possibility that current conditions and behaviours are creating selves hollowed of meaning and genuine connection to others.

Hear Mark Kingwell speak about his book on CBC Radio.

Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

The work is a diligently researched biography of Frank P. Ramsey, one of the twentieth century’s intellectual luminaries whose untimely death in 1930 at the age of 26 condemned him to popular obscurity. Frank Ramsey details with care and wit Ramsey’s relationships to other contemporary Cambridge notables such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes, outlining how this polymath powerfully influenced the course of twentieth-century intellectual life in his short lifetime.

Listen to Cheryl Misak talk about Frank Ramsey on BBC Radio 3 and read Anthony Gottlieb’s review of of the biography in the New Yorker.

Sophie Moreau, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people. Starting from actual legal cases in which claimants have alleged wrongful discrimination by other people or by the state, Faces of Inequality argues that we can best understand these people’s complaints by thinking of them as complaints about not, in some form, having been treated as an equal in their society— through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial of access to a basic good.

Graeme Nicholson, Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

This work offers a close reading of Martin Heidegger’s 1930 lecture titled “On the Essence of Truth,” as well as of the essay that Heidegger published under the same title years later, first in 1943 and then in 1949. Heidegger on Truth explores the German philosopher’s movements of thought as they are presented in the original address, and then compares them with subsequent versions, uncovering the changes and detours in Heidegger’s conceptualization of truth. 

Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

While recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may be of epochal significance, human intelligence, this provocative volume argues, is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning. It also unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at.

Watch Brian Cantwell Smith speak about AI and his book at Yale University in January 2020.

Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, ed., The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

Facing droughts, floods, and water-security challenges, society must increasingly develop new policies and practices to cope with the impact of climate change. The Wonder of Water explores how human experience—including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases—influences decisions around water. The volume, addressed not only to philosophers, expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology.

 

Articles

Michael Barkasi, “Are There Epistemic Conditions Necessary for Demonstrative Thought?”Synthese (2019): n.p. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02453-w

Michael Barkasi, “The Role of Experience in Demonstrative Thought,” Mind & Language 34, no. 5 (2019): 648–66. DOI: 10.1111/mila.12228

Mark Fortney, “Conceptualizing Intellectual Attention,” Theory & Psychology 29, no. 6 (2019): 775–78. DOI: 10.1177/0959354319853632

Mark Fortney, “Unity in the Scientific Study of Intellectual Attention,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2019): 1–16. DOI: 10.1017/can.2019.45

Mark Fortney, “Universal Hinges and the Bounds of Sense,” Philosophia 29, no. 6 (2019): 775–88. DOI:  10.1007/s11406-019-00110-7

Roberto Granieri, “Xenocrates and the Two-Category Scheme,” Apeiron, AoP (2019). DOI:  10.1515/apeiron-2019-0043

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, “Psychopathy Treatment and the Stigma of Yesterday’s Research,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29, no. 3 (2019): 243–72. DOI: 10.1353/ken.2019.0024

Róbert Mátyási, “Spinoza on Composition, Monism, and Beings of Reason,” Journal of Modern Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2020): 4. DOI:  10.32881/jomp.74

Emma McClure and Regina Rini, “Microaggression: Conceptual and Scientific Issues,” Philosophy Compass 15, no. 4 (2020): 1–11. DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12659

David Sackris and Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, “A Consideration of Carroll’s Content Theory,” Journal of Value Inquiry (2019): 1­11. DOI: 10.1007/s10790-019-09693-6

Kamil Majcherek, “Paul of Venice’s Metaphysics of Artefacts,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2020): 29-48. DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2019.1588703

Kamil Majcherek, “Walter Chatton’s Rejection of Final Causality,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 7 (2019): 212–42. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845515.003.0007

Julia Jael Smith, “Unacknowledged Permissivism,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2020): 158–83. DOI: 10.1111/papq.12299

Julia Jael Smith and Benjamin Wald, “Collectivized Intellectualism,” Res Philosophica 96, no. 2 (2019): 199–227. DOI: 10.11612/resphil.1766

Etye Steinberg, “Big Data and Personalized Pricing,” Business Ethics Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2019): 97–117. DOI: 10.1017/beq.2019.19

David Suarez, “Nature at the Limits of Science and Phenomenology,” Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1, no. 1 (2019): 109–­33. DOI: 10.1515/jtph-2019-0004

Evan Westra, “Folk Personality Psychology: Mindreading and Mindshaping in Trait Attribution,” Synthese (2020): n.p. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-020-02566-7

Evan Westra, “Getting to Know You: Accuracy and Error in Judgments of Character,”  Mind & Language, AoP (2019). DOI: 10.1111/mila.12258 

Evan Westra, “In Defense of Ordinary Moral Character Judgment,” Erkenntnis (2020): n.p. DOI: 10.1007/s10670-020-00257-w

Evan Westra, “Review Essay of Spaulding’s How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition,” Philosophical Psychology (2019): n.p.

 

Book Chapters

Willi Goetschel, Introduction to Contradiction Set Free, by Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, translated by John Koster (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Emma McClure, “Escalating Linguistic Violence: From Microaggressions to Hate Speech,” in Microaggressions and Philosophy, edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer (New York: Routledge, 2020), 121–45.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen and Janna Hastings, “From Affective Science to Psychiatric Disorder: Ontology as Semantic Bridge,” in New Perspectives in Psychopathology, edited by Diogo Telles-Correia and Elie Cheniaux (Lausanne, Switzerland: Frontiers Media SA. 2020), 108–20. DOI: 10.3389/978-2-88963-551-1

Rashad Rehman, “Ethics, Homelessness, and the Artes Liberales/Artes Serviles Distinction,” in The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by G. John M. Abbarno (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020), 429–47.

Rashad Rehman, “Josef Pieper’s Defense of the Geisteswissenchaften (Liberal Arts)” in Civility, Nonviolent Resistance, and the New Struggle for Social Justice, edited by Amin Asfari (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2019),  203–33.

Evan Westra, “Social Cognition and Theory of Mind,” in Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, edited by Benjamin D. Young and Carolyn Dicey Jennings (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), ch. 28.

 

Interviews

David Suarez, Interview with Into the Coast, September 14, 2019.

 

Journals

Under the lead editorship of Layla Pereira DaSilva and Julia DaSilva, the Philosophy Course Union (PCU) published the 20th edition of Noēsis: Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy in April 2019.

 

 

 

 

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