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) 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
4) 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
5) 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
6) 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
7) Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)
Why do so many philosophers value anarchy but refuse to call themselves anarchists? Why don’t philosophers draw on the classical anarchist tradition? How can we think de facto anarchism as distinct fr...Show More
8) Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we think about yesterday’s tennis final, or Aristotle, ...Show More
9) Sabrina L. Hom, "Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity" (Lexington Books, 2025)
What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to the narratives and actions of people who...Show More
10) Şerife Tekin, "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narrative for a Humanist Science" (Routledge, 2025)
Psychiatry’s quest for credibility as a scientific discipline led it to adopt a disorder-label orientation in which mental conditions are categorized in terms of measurable behavioral criteria. In Rec...Show More