New Books in Philosophy

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 practices of primarily Latinx artists. Moving from the ocular to the mouthly, Ortega opens up possibilities for being affected by art. She also shows how artists use aesthetic practices to transform themselves, the possibilities for life, and as means to refuse to forget the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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 our concepts all function the same way – for example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truthmakers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, when each of these discourses have different aims. Thomasson, who is Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering – of figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt, particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo-problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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 optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

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 – the idea that information-processing technologies are not merely tools but literal parts of our minds. While this thesis remains controversial, there is little doubt that technological devices can push information that coheres in an integrated way with your thoughts – for example, when your phone presents photographs of last year’s holiday on today’s anniversary. Such mind extensions create new vulnerabilities to invasions of mental privacy, freedom of thought, and protection from personal assault. Palermos, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Ioannina, articulates these new problems and explores what levels of protection we should adopt in the face of them, up to the point of making it technologically impossible to access or manipulate your extended mental contents.  S. Orestis Palermos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Ioannina, in Greece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many social scientists, social institutions are sets of rules about how to act, though theories differ about what the rules are, how they are established and maintained, and what makes some social institutions stable through social change and others more transient. In Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences (Springer, 2025), Armin Schulz defends a version of the general view that social institutions have functions, drawing on a concept of function from evolutionary biology. On his view, the function of a social institution is not a matter of its history, but those features that explain its ability to survive and thrive in the here and now. Schulz, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas, also uses this account to provide an explanation of what institutional corruption amounts to, and to analyze current debates between shareholder vs. stakeholder views of the function of a corporation. This book is available open access here Armin W. Schulz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy