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Best Philosophy Books/Articles of the Last Decade (2000-present), Part II

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM DECEMBER 24

The last thread grew quite long, so I thought it might be useful to start a second thread on the same topic.  Other blogs are doing similar things for particular specialties, featuring work in political philosophy and philosophy of action, for example; readers are certainly welcome to mention that work here as well.

The posting rules are the same:  full name, valid e-mail address, and give some reasons why the work in question is important and worth reading.  The latter will make the thread of particular value to those outside your sub-specialty trying to figure out what is worth reading.

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9 responses to “Best Philosophy Books/Articles of the Last Decade (2000-present), Part II”

  1. Matt Lister

    (This is a copy of what I'd said on the "best political philosophy books" thread at Crooked Timber.)

    I’ll leave aside books by friends/former teachers and the like, and will say that I feel unsure about calling things “best”, as there are just too many things that I didn’t read, and I’m unsure what will endure, given how that depends a lot on things we cannot know. But, a few books from the ‘00s that I found very interesting, learned a lot from, and enjoyed include Matthew Gibney’s The Ethics and Politics of Asylum (the best philosophical book on immigration related issues I’ve read), David Miller’s National Responsibility and Global Justice (the best book I’ve read by him, though I disagree at many points), Jan-Werner Muller’s Constitutional Patriotism (the best, or at least most interesting, account of a non-nationalist but not strongly cosmopolitan position I’ve seen), Anthony Simon Laden’s Reasonably Radical (a very interesting attempt to meld ideas from Rawls and Catherine MacKinnon, along with a good discussion of Hegel and Rousseau) and Allen Buchanan's Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (the best philosophical book on international law that I've seen.) There are, of course, things to disagree with in all of these, but all are very much worth reading for anyone interested in the topics.

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  2. Benj Hellie

    Flagging several papers that have been especially important in the consciousness literature:

    1) Chalmers, 'The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief' (2003) — the most explicit statement of the "revelation" doctrine that has bedeviled the philosophy of mind since the days of Place and Smart; also refocuses discussion of self-knowledge from difficult metasemantical questions to more tractable semantical and epistemological issues;

    2) Chalmers, 'The representational character of experience' (2004) — not the first paper on representationalism by any means but the one that cuts through the clutter of reductionist stuff enough to suddenly pop descriptive metaphysics of consciousness into a subfield in its own right;

    3) Martin, 'The limits of self-awareness' (2004) — explicit enough as a guide to how to be an externalist about consciousness to rescue the position from darkness.

    … also a shot-out for Michael Thompson's 'Naive action theory' (2008): a very imaginative monistic externalist gunky alternative to the rather timeworn Davidsonian orthodoxy.

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  3. John Fischer

    There have been some very worthwhile "nominations" on the Garden of Forking Paths discussion to which Brian has kindly linked. There I mentioned Derk Pereboom's monograph, Living Without Free Will, and Dana Nelkin's Journal of Philosophy article, "The Two Standpoints and the Belief in Freedom".

    Here I would like to mention Gary Watson's OUP collection, Agency and Answerability. This is really a landmark collection of Watson's brilliant and influential articles over his career.

    Happy Holidays to everyone (and this doesn't imply anything about intelligent design, Brian!)

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  4. Peter Anthony

    It was quite a good decade for work on Nietzsche. Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality (2002) was probably the most discussed work and, more recently, the very different book, The Affirmation of Life by Reginster, is also essential reading. Frederick Beiser's Hegel (2005?) was the best introduction to Hegel in a long time, probably since Taylor. I would say the same about Allen Wood's volume on Kant (2005) in the Blackwell series. And for some exciting philosophical history, the chapters on Hegel and Heidegger in Brandom's Tales of the Might Dead (2002), are terrific reading.

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  5. David Auerbach

    In historical philosophy, besides Beiser's _German Idealism_, there were two excellent studies on Kant from 2001: Michelle Grier's _Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion_ (which heavily influenced a good deal of the new material in Henry Allison's 2nd edition of _Kant's Transcendental Idealism_) and Beatrice Longuenesse's _Kant and the Capacity to Judge_.

    Grier's book is an original treatment of the gritty details of Kant's ever-controversial idealism (specifically, the relations between transcendental realism and transcendental idealism), while Longuenesse gives a very detailed reading of (cognitive) judgment in Kant. Both are original enough and careful enough to merit reading if you're interested in Kant.

    Willem DeVries' _Wilfred Sellars_. AFAIK, it is the first comprehensive attempt to explicate Sellars' philosophy systematically, identifying unifying strands of thought across his essays. So in addition to covering the better-known work on philosophy of mind and epistemology, there's also a detailed account of his logical and linguistic nominalism and his idiosyncratic views on sensory consciousness.

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  6. Luke Muehlhauser

    'The Myth of Morality', Richard Joyce.

    The most thorough defense of error theory since Mackie's 'Ethics', and basically the standard defense of moral fictionalism.

    'Good and Real', Gary Drescher

    A stunning attempt to present a coherent picture of naturalism that unravels paradoxes in consciousness, physics, time, and ethics.

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  7. Chris Tucker

    Jim Pryor's "The Skeptic and the Dogmatist" is a highly cited epistemology paper and was in the 2000 volume of the Philosopher's Annual. Off the top of my head, I think it has two main contributions. First, it clarifies the Cartesian-styled skeptical reasoning. Second, it clarifies the dogmatist view, roughly the idea that perceptual experiences provide justification without having antecedent reason to reject skeptical hypotheses. I think Pryor was the first to use the "dogmatist" label for this view (but not the first to endorse it), and the name seems to have stuck.

    Happy Holidays!

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  8. Mike Bruno

    I think the following works at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences are quite likely three of best works in philosophy in the past decade.

    1. Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë (2001): "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness"

    This article is notable for the depth of its presentation of the empirical literature on visual perception, and for the ways in which it utilizes the empirical evidence presented to argue for an enactive account of perceptual experience.

    2. Robert Wilson (2004): Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences

    This book is notable for its metaphysical sophistication in addressing concerns pertaining to and augmenting the overall case for externalism about the vehicles (rather than the representational contents or phenomenal characters) of both conscious and unconscious mental states and processes.

    3. Evan Thompson (2007): Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

    This book is notable for its attempt to synthesize phenomenological investigations of experience and agency with theoretical work on the nature of self-organizing systems in order to illuminate many interesting dimensions of mind; and for the progress Thompson makes in explaining how phenomenal consciousness is related to and grounded in things that can be understood entirely in third-person, experimentally tractable, terms.

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  9. Carlos Ruiz

    Paul Katsafanas's article, "Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology" was a very wonderful read. It converged contrasting developments on Nietzsche's thoughts regarding agency and drives (central to his psychology and philosophy of mind & action), and formulated them into a coherent account that resembles the embodiment discussed heavily in phenomenology today. This article was very well structured and incorporates excellent research that helps illuminate Nietzsche's position by placing him in the context of his reading of Schopenhauer and 19-th century materialism and developments in psychology and biology.

    Nadeem Hussain's article, "Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche's Free Spirits" was another wonderful read, this one discussing Nietzsche in respect to his epistemology. In this article he fully articulates the position of Nietzsche as a sort of error theorist who is a fictionalist about meaning in our language and concepts—language has pragmatic value but is deficient when it comes to mirroring the true, objective content of the world. This articulation seems like a refined extension of some of Nietzsche's earlier thoughts and has drawn controversy in being somewhat anachronistic or in potentially not fully resonating with Nietzsche's later thought. Nevertheless, this paper is a wonderful, clear anchor for further discussion in Nietzsche's epistemology.

    In terms of important influence, Brian Leiter's book, "Nietzsche On Morality" and several of his articles, "Nietzsche's Theory of Will" and "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action" contain influential and controversial ideas that have spurred much fruitful discussion in Nietzsche studies.

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