The 2 Best New Books in Philosophy Podcast Episodes
1) Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. This e...Show More
2) Justin Garson, "What Biological Functions are and Why They Matter" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Why do zebras have stripes? One way to answer that question is ask what function stripes play in the lives of zebras – for example, to deter disease-carrying flies from biting them. This notion of a f...Show More
3) Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are inadequate for...Show More
4) Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding that justice requires that politi...Show More
5) Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structure when they observed Franklin...Show More
6) Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)
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...Show More
Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)
1:16:41 | Dec 16th, 2025
7) Amie Thomasson, "Rethinking Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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 ...Show More
8) Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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 Pre...Show More
9) S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)
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 – ...Show More
10) Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)
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 insti...Show More