Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Performing Arts — Music

Highlighting both the peaks and the valleys of Diderot's eventful, passionate pursuit of life as art, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely is a freewheeling blend of intellectual biography, slice-of-life social history, and adroit textual commentary. Diverging from earlier readings of Diderot's biography, which saw in his published writings only episodic moments of brilliance--and refused to see in his lifelong passion for social networking anything but opportunism--Curran (Wesleyan Univ.) offers a thrilling contrast of Diderot. Here is the outsider on the inside, sharpening and perfecting the critical instruments of Socrates and Seneca. Like an improbable prophet of postmodernism, Diderot was borne along by the revolutionary odyssey of popular enlightenment and the quest for literary immortality, both of which took him perilously between the Scylla of flagrant, imperial power and the Charybdis of multiform, philosophical critique. Curran's book is superb. With consummate skill, he weaves a tale that is riveting as historical narrative and engaging as critical exposition of Diderot's key works. Curran's deft interweaving of textual commentary with historical scholarship makes for rich and rewarding reading, and provides a sense of what the larger stakes were for the Enlightenment philosophes.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

A well-known and respected independent scholar, Haven provides a stimulating, insightful account of the life and thought of Rene Girard (1923-2015), one of the most brilliant and creative minds of the last 100 years, showing how he formulated and developed the theory he called mimetic desire. Haven presents Girard's life in the form of an intellectual biography to demonstrate that one can use his studies of history, literature, and anthropology to trace the growth of his theory as he sought to understand the central role conflict and violence play in human history and society. Girard's accomplishment was to show that violence can be traced to desire as it shapes human motivations, organizes social relations, and inevitably leads to the outbreak of violence that spreads like a contagious disease. In Girard's theory, conflict is rooted not in a person's objects of love but in subjects who desire the same object they cannot both have, that is, in human sameness rather than in human difference. Girard's solution to the problem of violence is not to build defenses against opponents, for that escalates and spreads violence, but to renounce violence, difficult though that is. An excellent book about a complex theory.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Lehrer (emer., Univ. of Arizona) has been a towering figure in epistemology for 50 years. Exemplars of Truth presents not only a summary but also a synthesis of the development of the themes that run throughout his work on knowledge, self-trust, consciousness, and autonomy. What is particularly new is the development of his account of exemplar representation. For Lehrer, knowledge is an internal capacity to locally justify or meet objections (defensibility) to the target claim in terms of an evaluative, background system. What is novel here is how experience relates to the background system. Lehrer argues that conscious experience is self-representational, and that the acceptance of that representation incorporates the experience that makes it true. Reflection on experience turns the experience into an exemplar. The exemplar representation extends itself to represent the world and secure truth about the world. Written in a straightforward, engaging style, this volume reinforces why Lehrer is a canonical figure in analytic epistemology. Not only will Exemplars of Truth will be of interest for those concerned with Lehrer's work, but Lehrer's development of exemplar representation will surely generate new discussion in epistemology and philosophy of mind.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Given the contemporary focus on what life feels like, one has difficulty imagining how the subject of experience could not have come up in earlier conceptions of what emotions are and do. But philosophical analysis of the "passions" was quite different in the centuries before psychology and neurobiology came on the scene. Through meticulous, attentive exposition of key texts, Perler (Humboldt-Universitat, Germany) spells out the varied conceptions of emotions from the 13th to 17th centuries. Using the recurring example of how a human and a sheep react to an encounter with a wolf, Perler expounds the Aristotelian-grounded theories of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, moves on to Montaigne's skeptical anti-essentialism, and then to the substance dualism of Descartes and substance monism of Spinoza. The persuasiveness of each conceptualization rests on critical metaphysical assumptions that may seem foreign to today's readers, but one must ask if contemporary conceptions of emotions are any less time bound and context specific. Perler occasionally allows contemporary questions to inform his discussion, and the introduction and conclusion contextualize historical questions surrounding the study of emotions more generally. The result is historical philosophical analysis at its best. This is an impressive (albeit dense) and carefully reasoned tour de force.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In Heidegger and the Problem of Consciousness, Holland (Hamline Univ.) takes up a perennial philosophical issue: how are the mind and the world related? Holland expounds Martin Heidegger's view of the mind and world relation by examining Heidegger's account of consciousness. She argues that, according to Heidegger, the mind is relational. In a sense, it is itself empty and becomes full of content only in relation to the world. Arguing against accounts of the mind that take it to be a stand-alone subject--of an immaterialist (separable soul) sort or a physicalist sort (brain or physical events in the brain)--Holland concludes that Heidegger's view helps one overcome the problem of consciousness by rejecting the division between mind and world. Holland is to be praised for writing such a clear, readable, and important work on such a difficult issue.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Stauffer (government, Univ. of Texas, Austin) provides a clear, comprehensive overview of Hobbesian political philosophy. The author brings together a wide range of texts in the Hobbesian corpus in order to show that Hobbes produced a new science of politics that was to be radically distinguished from traditional political philosophy and scholasticism. Bringing politics and religion together to look at them through the same lens allows the author to highlight what is most salient for the waves of liberalism and secularism that followed in Hobbes's wake. Stauffer rejects interpretations of Hobbes that tie him too closely to state and ecclesiastical power. Stauffer claims that Hobbes's enlightened "kingdom of light" was a rebuttal of religion and religious polity. Well researched and insightful, this book is a must read for those working in early-modern political philosophy, political theology, or religious studies, and for those interested in liberalism, secularization, religious toleration, and the extent to which religion and politics are linked.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In the West, the dogged pursuit of a worthy goal or ambitious striving for a career seems like what one is destined to do. For Marx, the importance of making things is implicit in human nature; for Kant, rationally motivated hard work is an obligation for autonomous rational beings. O'Connor (University College Dublin) questions these assumptions and gives one reason to reexamine whether the idle life might be a good life after all. He does not so much argue for idleness, though this would have been fruitful and thought provoking in itself, as critique of Western philosophers' arguments against the idle life. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hegel (among many others)--innovative and creative critics of the status quo though they were--argued that living a life of idleness is something to be avoided. O'Connor lays out a meticulous case against anti-idleness, shining light on assumptions most people rarely question. The relationships between idleness and respect, work, boredom, play, and freedom are all considered. This is a refreshing look at a topic rarely even allowed into the conversation about what it is to have a good life.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason is much more synthetic than analytical, at times meandering in topic from dreams to literature and comedy, from learned references to the commonplace. Indeed, the word irrationality is not even loosely defined until page 265, and its manifestations are not systematically ordered. Yet Smith (history and philosophy of science, Univ. of Paris 7-Denis Diderot, France) offers keen observations on both the history and contemporary place of irrationality in human life. Though Smith frequently critiques the US's current and lamentable fact-free political regime, he offers far more than a complaint about the 2016 election. He presents complex reflections on how the US got to where it is (and was perhaps bound to get eventually). For Smith, irrationality lies at the heart of reason, and the most rational algorithms can always be "weaponized" (as he writes in the introduction) by irrational forces, as exemplified not only by the internet but also by science and even logic itself, for the simulacrums of rational discourse too easily displace the reality. Some readers may want tighter organization, and certainly this work is no replacement for more systematic analyses of irrationality and of contemporary malaise, but Smith's insights are all too relevant to the present and the future.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Mendes-Flohr (emer., Univ. of Chicago Divinity School and Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) has devoted his entire academic career to studying Martin Buber (1878-1965). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Buber nearly 50 years ago, is editing the 22-volume German edition of Buber's work, and has been involved in a variety of publication projects on Buber. The present study is undoubtedly his definitive work and also the definitive study of Buber. The volume opens with a chapter on Buber's difficult early years, and then deals with the philosophy of dialogue and other important aspects of Buber's work. Included are discussions of Buber's deep-rooted cultural Zionism, which included a commitment to a binational state; his heroic work for the German Jewish community prior to WW II; and his late years as professor of sociology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His deep commitment to Buber notwithstanding, Mendes-Flohr points out, in the introduction, that "Buber had his foibles.... Buber was not a perfect human being although he was perfectly human." This is true, and the one major criticism that can be made of this volume is that it could have been more critical. However, this is now the authoritative work on Buber and the place that all students of Buber should begin.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Rockmore (Institute of Foreign Policy, Peking Univ., China) has added another book to his impressive scholarship on 18th- and 19th-century German theory. In Marx's Dream, he attempts to set the record straight on how best to interpret Marx, that is, through Marx's own voice or through Engels and the Marxist traditions. Rockmore's Marx is a profound philosopher in the spirit of Socrates, a man whose failures lie in his accounts of how to remedy the ills of industrialization rather than in his diagnosis of them. The author divides the book into three parts. He begins with discussions of how Marx understood the relation between theory and practice and how his thought significantly differed from that of Engels. In the second part, Rockmore investigates Marx's relation to Hegelian philosophy and undermines the traditional reading of Marx as a materialist. Rockmore concludes the book by considering the nature of human flourishing, particularly within the modern, industrial era. Marx's Dream is a must read for those studying Marx and Marxism or 19th-century German theory, and it will be of great interest to those working more broadly in economics, German history, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Nietzsche's published writings find themselves frequently enclosed by scholarly brackets that accord them an aura of inviolable "untimeliness." This uncritical assumption of absolute singularity stems from Nietzsche's own literary posturing and aligns with his early, self-directed admonition to "hold fast to the sublime." This interpretive assumption, though fruitful for novice readers, leaves seasoned readers with abiding questions regarding Nietzsche's pronounced appetite for launching into garrulous social commentary and for interlacing notable political asides in his works. With this extensively researched and brilliantly executed reappraisal, Holub (German languages and literatures, Ohio State) aims to correct the distortions resulting from this "untimely" bias. In a treatment that is part social history, part literary biography, Holub succeeds in repositioning and contextualizing the author of Zarathustra. In the book's nine thematic chapters, the author reopens the question of Nietzsche's thoughts about (and most probable stance regarding) such contested issues of the 19th century as popular education, feminism, anti-Semitism, evolution, cosmology, colonization, nationalism, and eugenics. The Nietzsche who emerges from these pages is a far more intriguing, far more engaged experimentalist than the strident, one-note culture warrior he is often mistaken to be.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this provocative and rigorous intellectual history of "outlandish ideas" (as the publisher page has it), Eburne (comparative literature, Pennsylvania State Univ.) makes a convincing case for the inclusion of outsider theories in any proper intellectual history of the modern world. By studying bad as well as good ideas, one can perceive the traffic between outsider theory and ideas that are anchored to widely accepted epistemic norms. Eburne cautions that outsider is best thought of not as meaning the abnormal but rather as indicating a dynamic asymmetrical relation between ideas one takes seriously and ideas one does not take seriously. By broadening one's mental archive to include these ideas, Eburne contends, one can better see that the modern age is just as much a product and project of the outlandish and the occult as it is of the constellation of ideas that predominate the intellectual life of the present. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students alike. Scholars will find much to consider in Eburne's methodological innovations, and students will find Eburne's case studies of outsider theory to be fascinating explorations of how ideas, once discarded, often have had a subterranean influence on contemporary intellectual life.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Lysaker (Emory Univ.) provides a tour de force self-examination and analysis of philosophical writing and philosophical purpose. He addresses multiple facets of the nature of philosophical writing: what is written, how it is written, why it is written, by and to whom it is written. Lysaker engages with these concerns thoughtfully and honestly, so the book is far more than a survey. For example, he considers various modes of philosophical writing: journal articles, treatises, manifestos, essays, dialogues, blogs, and other forms of etexts. He touches on the inherent and inescapable interconnections and cross-fertilization between the products of such writing and the various processes--e.g., aphorisms, structured argumentation, polemics--and discusses how they necessarily relate to the goals of such writing, for example, to express a stance, generate engagement with others, seek discovery (for both author and audience), create transformation (again, for both author and audience). Along the way Lysaker wrestles with an impressive array of thinkers: Plato, Walter Benjamin, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, and many others.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Rights and Demands is a mature philosophical exploration of how to understand the nature, scope, and limits of demand rights. To have such a right is to have standing to demand something of another. But on what grounds? Gilbert (Univ. of California, Irvine) argues that demand rights are grounded solely in joint commitments, which she illustrates using promises and other social agreements. The solely is important because she denies that demand rights have a grounding outside of social agreements. Further, moral demand rights cannot be generated by a legal system unless joint commitments are involved. The book ends with a fascinating chapter titled "Human Rights in Light of the Foregoing," in which Gilbert discusses in some detail the views of Henry Shue (Basic Rights, CH, May'81; 2nd ed., 1996), Charles Beitz (The Idea of Human Rights, 2009), and Joseph Raz (The Morality of Freedom, CH, Dec'86). Gilbert does not deny that there are such things as moral rights, though she does suggest that they are more problematic than many philosophers suppose. What she does deny is that human rights are demand rights, as she understands them. This wonderful book is a treasure store of careful argumentation.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In her remarkable Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (CH, Feb'11, 48-3243), Brox studied the history of visible indoor illumination and the impact of illumination on individuals and society. Brox now takes up the impact of enforced auditory silence on individual and social development. The primary loci of her historical study are the prison and the monastery--both places that hold, in some measures, to the benefits of imposed silence. In particular she looks at the practice of silence in Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary prison (from its initial founding in 1929) and in the Gesthsemani Trappist monastery (the monastery of Thomas Merton) in Kentucky. Brox studies both the specific ways in which these practices of silence were imposed and the thinking that was meant to justify their use. She concludes by considering both the beneficial and the detrimental aspects of enforced silence in various aspects of contemporary life. Both readable and scholarly, this volume is replete with historical documentation.Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers.

Heidegger's philosophy and his association with nationalism socialism (i.e., Nazism) has generated volume after volume of description, explanation, and puzzlement. This volume is novel in that Wolfson (Jewish studies and religion, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) addresses both Heidegger's philosophy and his problematic affiliation with the aim of "shedding new light on the vexing labyrinth of issues ... as a scholar of Jewish mysticism," as he writes in the preface. Though Wolfson makes it abundantly clear that he is not an apologist, he does note, further on in the preface, that "the real scandal is to scandalize Heidegger with such platitudes as that he was a fascist from start to finish or that anti-Semitism was at the heart of his philosophy without scrutinizing his writings to determine meticulously the contours of his dystopian misadventure." The result of Wolfson's work is a deeply nuanced interpretation of connections between various Heideggerian theses and Kabbalistic thinking on language, truth, and knowledge. Of particular note is a discussion of the nature and role of silence. This rich scholarly treatment of Heidegger's social, political, and philosophical life adds a voice to Heideggerian studies that should not be missed. Wolfson includes more than 90 pages of explanatory notes as well as an extensive bibliography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Jeske (Univ. of Iowa) argues that everyone, not just philosophers, should learn the art or practice of self-critical moral philosophy. To succeed in this often-painful task is, among other things, to become more honest, more sympathetic, and less complacent. Jeske uses "psychopath" (author's quotes) Ted Bundy as an example of someone whose complete inability to engage with others places him outside morality. Using historically and psychologically well-informed case studies of several Nazis and southern American slave holders who suffered profound moral failure, the author explores the various strategies humans employ for letting themselves off the moral hook. Without hectoring, she also asks readers to consider their treatment of nonhuman animals in the light of her discussions. Wearing its learning lightly, the book can be profitably read by a wide audience. Theoretical positions and distinctions become of more than abstract interest in the light of the case studies. Jeske writes clearly with a minimum of jargon. She provides the right amount of detail to explain the most important controversies, and she also points to arguments that more thorough discussions of these controversies would need to explore.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This is a timely treatise. Buchanan (Duke Univ.) and Powell (Boston Univ.) present a novel theory of moral progress based on recent findings of some dozen evolutionary theorists and on new data in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, moral psychology, and history. Citing many examples from these disciplines, the authors reject theories that view human moral responses as genetically hardwired against altruism. Instead, they show that the "adaptive plasticity" of the moral response allows both moral progress and moral regress, depending on cultural selection in different environments. The moral progress that humans have achieved in recent history is fragile. It depends on the cultural selection--in stable social and environmental conditions--of norms, practices, laws, and institutions that favor cooperation among social groups, sympathy for strangers, and concern for vulnerable populations of humans and animals. Under these circumstances human beings have achieved significant moral progress, as evidenced by reductions in rates of homicide, racial and sexual inequality, and egregious cruelty toward human and nonhuman animals. However, influential cultural leaders can easily reverse all this by nurturing exclusionary cultures based on fear and distrust.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Foley (philosophy, NYU) has spent most of his career as a dean, not only in the humanities but across all the arts and sciences. This long career of thinking about disparate academic disciplines, both in the sciences and humanities, informs this short book, which reads as a sort of love story to higher learning. The sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) are different from the humanities (philosophy, linguistics, etc.): the sciences are objective, descriptive, and universal, whereas the humanities tend toward human-centered questions and value-prescriptive inquiries. Broadly speaking, the aims of the sciences and the humanities are, and ought to be, different. Foley argues that they matter equally, but for separate reasons. This is a timely argument, given pressure on the academy from both directions--i.e., political pressures threaten to undermine the legitimacy of the sciences, and short-term thinking and a focus on job-skills training threaten funding to the humanities, particularly at large state universities. Foley's examples, and a long case study in chapter 4, focus on philosophy, but his extremely approachable arguments will interest anyone concerned with the future of the arts and sciences.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Knowledge is arguably the foremost preoccupation of philosophers. But very little has been written about epistemic vices. As Cassam (Univ. of Warwick, UK) points out, these vices--among them intellectual arrogance, gullibility, and close-mindedness--obstruct one's ability to attain knowledge and thus result in false beliefs. But though these vices are relatively stable intellectual traits, one can exercise some control over them if one is mindful of them. This being the case, individuals can be held responsible for the negative consequences that flow from not knowing things they could and should have known, and thinking they know things that they do not. This wide-ranging, thoughtful discussion of epistemic vices will interest philosophers working in epistemology, but the book has a much wider reach. Cassam devotes a lot of space to looking at political decisions that resulted from manifestations of these intellectual vices and had seriously harmful consequences. Given its coverage of important practical issues of the day, this timely book should be read by all who wonder why the quality of political life and decision-making in the US has deteriorated.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

German-American philosopher, translator, and author Walter Kaufmann (1921-80) is one the most important and unjustly neglected philosophical interpreters of the postwar era. Kaufmann would be worth remembering even if he had only written a reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought that led to a wholesale reappraisal of his work. Condemned as the philosophical inspiration of national socialism, Nietzsche had been all but forgotten until the publication of Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950, now in its fifth edition)--a book that single-handedly made Nietzsche's thought worthy of study once more. But Corngold's excellent biography reveals that there was much more to Kaufmann's work than just this worthy study of Nietzsche. A scholar and translator who thought carefully about the place of religion and tragedy in the modern world, Kaufmann reminded the world of the rich heritage of German literature, culture, and thought despite the Nazis best attempt to consign that legacy to oblivion. Corngold's excellent biography is an elegant recognition not only of this brilliant philosopher and scholar but also of a postwar American society in which humanist scholarship really mattered.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.