New Books in Philosophy New Books Network

In political philosophy, “liberalism” is not the name of a particular social platform. Rather, it refers to a framework for thinking about politics. It is the way of thinking according to which the state, its laws, and its institutions all stand in need of justification, and that the justification of the state must be addressed to those who live within its territory. In this way, liberalism as a philosophical stance affirms the moral equality of persons and prioritizes the liberty of each, “taken one by one,” as it were. The idea of liberalism as a way of life thus may seem curious. According to many traditional liberal thinkers, liberalism is distinguished from other approaches by the denial that it is a “way of life.” On these views, a liberal political order establishes the conditions under which each individual can “seek their own good in their own way,” as John Stuart Mill put it.
In Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press 2024), Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism currently informs our cultural sensibilities. What’s more, he argues that liberalism is a worthwhile way of life.
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Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? 
In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism.
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Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp contrast, today's artificial neural networks – deep learning – are able to learn from experience, and perform at human-like levels of perceptual categorization, language production, and other cognitive abilities at h. This difference has been portrayed as roughly parallel to the philosophical divide between rationalists or nativists on the one hand, and empiricists on the other. 
In From Deep Learning to Rational Machines (Oxford UP, 2024), Cameron Buckner lays out a program for future AI development based on discussions of the human mind by such figures as David Hume, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Sophie de Grouchy, among others. Buckner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, offers a conceptual framework that occupies a middle ground between the extremes of 'blank slate' empiricism and innate domain specific faculty psychology, and defends the claim that neural network modelers have found, at least in some cases, a sweet spot of abstraction from the messy details of biological cognition so as to capture the relevant similarities in their artificial networks.
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It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification.
In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country’s legacy of unjust housing policies.
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Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo’s hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation.
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Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience. 
In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays out the seemingly irreconciliable theoretical commitments of ecological psychology and neuroscience, and then defends a framework for reconciling them: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). According to Favela, who is an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at the University of Central Florida, complexity science provides the conceptual tools that can help integrate these frameworks, such as by articulating the key notion of affordances in ecological psychology as a kind of dimensional reduction in complexity science.
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