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It's the time of year when the media start running "the best books" of the year lists, mostly a mix of best-selling garbage, with an occasional book of merit thrown in. What books or articles did readers here most enjoy/admire this year? Please don't just name them, but say something about them, to assist others in assessing whether they'd want to read them too. (These need not be only philosophy books and articles.)
The best philosophical monograph I read this year is Charles Travis' _Perception_ (OUP 2013). I don't know how or why I came to think what I did about the nature of perception, perceptual experience, and the relationship between seeing and believing. It all seems to be stuff that was in the air that you catch like a cold. Travis does a nice job dismantling a picture of perceptual experience that had earlier seemed both obviously true and useful for doing epistemology. The writing is gnomic, but it grows on you.
The best paper I read this year was Mike Titelbaum's "Rationality's Fixed Point (Or: In Defense of Right Reason)", which is coming out soon in an edition of Oxford Studies in Epistemology. He discusses a really interesting puzzle having to do with the possibility of certain kinds of rational mistake, those that have to do with the demands of rationality. I've come begrudgingly to think that his solution to the puzzle is the right one and that it tells us some important things about epistemic normativity. (I'm happy to say that I think I've found a small mistake in the paper, which means that there's more to be said about the puzzle.) Part of the reason that I think that the paper is so good is that it's already generated some really good discussion. The best paper I've seen delivered at a conference this year Maria Lasonen-Aarnio's paper, "Enkrasia or Evidentialism? Learning to love mismatch" and the version of the paper I heard was a sketch of an alternative solution to the puzzle about rational mistakes about rationality. I expect that the puzzle and issues related to it will generate a lot of good discussion for the next few years, so it gets my vote.
Maybe you can start a thread for the worst books/articles read this year on Dec. 31st so that philosophers that have tucked into their drinks can start telling everyone what they really think about what they read this year.
Lee Smolin and Roberto Mangabeira Unger – The Singular Universe
http://leesmolin.com/writings/the-singular-universe-and-the-reality-of-time
1/2 Philosophy, 1/2 Science
An argument for epistemological and ontological humility and against the math/universe equivalence.
Wonderful and difficult, especially Smolin's part, but a joy to read. A good antidote to the prevailing scientism from an eminent philosopher AND a great physicist.
Caspar Hare's The Limits of Kindness is a masterful work of philosophy. The arguments are rigorous as well as ingenious. Assumptions are flagged — literally, with the word ‘flag’ in small caps. The writing is clear, crisp, concise, and accessible. There are many helpful illustrations. Even the cover, which shows a photographic morphing of the author’s image into that of his wife via morphed images of his two children, is great and alludes to his ingenious morphing argument. But, most importantly, the book makes original and important contributions to three key problems in moral philosophy: the non-identity problem, the problem of aggregation, and the problem of determining our obligations to needy, distant strangers. And Hare takes an atypical approach to these problems. Instead of employing the method of reflective equilibrium, he tries to derive substantial moral conclusions from some very minimal assumptions about moral decency, practical rationality, and the nature of our essences, such as that (1) your being morally decent involves your preferring — at least, when absolutely everything else is equal — that other people are better off rather than worse off, that (2) being practically rational, your actions will be guided by your preferences, which will be coherent, meaning that they will, at least, be transitive with respect to maximal states of affairs (fully specific ways for everything to be), and that (3) personal essence is not perfectly fragile: all people could have been ever so slightly different along any natural dimension, including height, time of birth, genetic make-up, etc. It's surprising how much headway Hare is able to make from such minimal assumptions.
I am at that stage of life where the music I like, once undeniably ice-cool, is met with utter hilarity by the kids. So in keeping with my new status as yesterday's guy, allow me to nominate two books in the 'golden oldies' category.
First, G.A. Cohen's posthumously published Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy (Princeton 2014). I occasionally went to some of these lectures back in the day. The book is naturally not an adequate substitute for a performance by Jerry himself, who is often in my thoughts and sorely missed. Yet the book is a wonderful reminder of and testament to the man's amazing scholarly range, philosophical acuity, and literary facility (not to mention his legendary comic talent).
Another no-less-wonderful blast from the past, albeit temperamentally very different, is Bernard Williams' Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 (Princeton 2014). Everything is lined up chronologically and you can read it as a kind of intellectual autobiography delivered from beyond the grave. Williams is not exactly comic but he is always wry, and often mischievous. There is lots of good political analysis as well as classic philosophical moves, including good clean versions of his well-known takes on utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. And a lot of unsqueamish demolition. Chapter 61, in particular, is surely the kind of review that (on occasions) we would all have liked to write.
Three books in particular impressed me this year (none of which are 2014 releases, but recent at least). One thing they all have in common is that they are well-written, have an demonstrated extensive knowledge of relevant literature, and (I'd argue) deserve a pivotal place in future discussion of their topic areas. No particular order of recommendation.
Neil Levy's Hard Luck. Though worries about the role of luck in matters of responsibility have increased in last couple of decades, Levy's book makes a particularly good case that it simply cannot be cast aside if we're serious about questions of fairness and justice in our moral practices.
Thom Brook's Punishment. Great background survey of the major positions on punishment and makes a strong argument for restorative justice as part of a unified theory.
Manuel Vargas' Building Better Beings. Detailed presentation of his free will revisionism, which maintains that we need to overhaul our obsession with more classic positions on the problem in favor of a restructured position that better meets our various demands for holding people responsible in workable and just ways.
Finally, a plug for some fiction–or is it?–Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members. LOL witty and cuts very painfully close to the bone about contemporary academia. If you've ever read–or written–a cringe-worthy letter of recommendation, you must read this book!
One novel–it's actually five–The Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. They are very witty, often about emotionally difficult material (auto-biographical), with some hilarious philosophical and meta-philosophical material.
Some examples.
Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.
Wittgenstein had said that the philosophers’ treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment. Purging? Leeches? …Indigestion tablets, thought Victor.
Personal identity, of course, is a fiction, a pure fiction. But I’ve reached this conclusion by the wrong method.
What was that?
Not thinking about it.
But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say “He was very philosophical about it? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.
I second Alan White's "Dear Committee Members."
The book in philosophy that most impressed me (by quite a lot) this year was Tzachi Zamir's Acts. It's a kind of first: a sustained philosophical account of acting. Zamir argues that acting should be understood as what he calls 'existential amplification'. He explicates his claim at length, criticizes other views, and offers a series of case studies–puppets, pornography (!), anorexia (!!)–in which he states both remarkably illuminating insights into the topic and enriches his general claim with points from the examples. He also gave the most astounding defense of his views I've ever heard from a philosopher, last year at the ASA meeting in San Diego, where he left his critics gaping as he re-counted his acting lessons, reciting a line from King Lear as a novice, an advanced beginner, an intermediate, and a masterful actor.
I'd hesitate to say what the "best book" of the year was, but the one that I most enjoyed reading this year was "Faith and Wisdom in Science" by Tom McLeish.
If I may, I'll nominate one new book, one philosophical classic (new to me at any rate this year), and one work of fiction.
The new book is Robert Brandom's From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars. For those of us drawn to the synoptic vision of humanity-in-the-world offered by Sellars but who sometimes have a challenging time grasping Sellar's precise path and goal (the experience known to all Sellarsians as "Bewilfridkeit"), Brandom provides a uniquely insightful vade mecum. I'll note that this is a really new book–it has a notional publication date from Harvard UP of January 6, 2015, but it is in fact available now.
The classic is C.D. Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature, first published in 1925. Though the topics Broad canvasses have all received a thorough working-over in the intervening decades, and though surely no one now would embrace all or even many of its conclusions, Broad's wonderfully supple philosophical style is a delight on every page and could profitably be used as a model by anyone working in this philosophical tradition.
The work of fiction is Richard Powers's Orfeo. Powers exhibits his usual sure grasp of his topics, in this case music and biology, presented in a masterly novel exemplifying all the traditional novelistic values: plot, pacing, characterization, and so forth. As always with Powers, though, your mileage may vary.
One of the best books I read this year was Neil Levy's Consciousness and Moral Responsibility. Levy claims that consciousness is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, and displays the various shortcomings of views that deny the centrality of consciousness. Levy does a remarkable job blending his (scientifically informed) theory of consciousness with an account of human agency and moral responsibility. And the book is wonderfully terse (a virtue, to be sure)!
The most entertaining article that I read was Eleonore Stump's "The Nature of a Simple God," in Proceedings of the ACPA. Stump has been one of the most ardent (and visible) defenders of the orthodox conception of simplicity in recent years. While I disagree with almost every move she makes in the paper, I admired her subtlety and creativity in developing a palatable theory of divine simplicity.
Rebecca Solnit's essay collection called "Men Explain Things to Me". (Solnit is what I would call a popular philosopher.) In addition to the title essay, the piece called "Virginia Woolf: Embracing the Inexplicable" is a wonderful meditation on ineffability.
I am at the stage of life when the sad, sorry music that I listened to as a kid is now retro-chic. In that spirit, I recommend a brilliant re-hash: Derk Pereboom's Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in life is a terrific reworking of his earlier book Living Without Free Will – sharp, radical, clear, challenging, and in its own unusual way, deeply humane. Plenty to argue about; even more to admire.
I haven't finished it yet, but I've been reading Tim Crane's Objects of Thought recently (assigned one chapter + one part to my students, we enjoyed it so much we stuck an extra lecture on the topic into the syllabus and read a few more chapters, now I'm going to read the rest of it myself). When I first considered a career as an academic philosopher, I was intending to do philosophy related to fiction; I ended up getting derailed by logic which has been my focus since then, but I've found reading this book has re-lighted my interest in how philosophical accounts of truth and meaning deal with fictional discourse, and I appreciate Crane's straightforward, almost common-sensical approach, which aligns closely to my own preferences.
Pleasantly surprised to find my Punishment noted above! My favourite of the year must be Martha Nussbaum's Political Emotions – an absolutely superb tour de force.
Well, the book I've most recently spent money to acquire: Charles Parsons, "Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century". A collection of essays, most of them previously published (though not always in obvious and accessible places: several were new to me). Consistent high quality, from a subtle and historically informed philosopher.
A recent, challenging book I've read this year has to be Peter Anstey's 'John Locke and Natural Philosophy' (2011). Anstey's work, both here and in much of his other publications, displays a daunting level of historical detail. While I'm not generally one for history oriented work (it's not a critical text) I found the way he embeds Locke's thought within the emerging New Science really elucidated the broad role naturalism was playing even at this time in the enlightenment.
I also re-read Word and Object, so that gets a default vote!
I don't know if it was released in 2014, but I thought Tim Button's 'The Limits of Realism' was totally brilliant.
How about "The Man who Loved Dogs" by the Cuban writer, Leonardo Padura, first published in 2009?
Padura lives in Cuba and is one of the most popular writers there.
The novel narrates how an unsuccessful writer meets a mysterious man walking his dogs on the beach in the 1970's. The man turns out to be Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's assassin, who after serving jail time in Mexico, ended up in Cuba.
The book then narrates three parallel stories mixing historical facts with fiction, the writer getting to know the ageing and sick Mercader, Mercader's experience in the Spanish Civil War and his training by the NKVD as an assassin and spy and finally, Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union and his murder in Mexico City.
Padura's book is that rare beast, a novel about communism that is neither anti-communist nor pro-communist, simply about communists. The stuff about Trotsky seems to come from Deustcher's biography (with fictional insights into Trotsky's inner life). I found the sections on Mercader's participation in the Spanish Civil War and his training as Stalinist killer to be fascinating as they show the incredible mixture of fanaticism, dedication to the noble anti-Fascist cause and cold realpolitik behind Stalinists in the 1930's.
It's not a philosophy book and it was published in 2006, but I read Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction a few months ago and I thought it was amazing. It's a very thorough economic history of the Third Reich that shows how important it is to pay attention to economic factors in order to really understand that period of history. Among other things, the author shows that Germany's policies, both domestic and international, during the 1930's were to a significant extent constrained by a severe and recurrent balance of payments problem, that Hitler's decision to precipitate war with France and Great Britain in 1939 despite the huge bet it represented was not the result of a miscalculation but was largely driven by economic considerations which made sense given his background ideological assumptions and that his decision to invade the USSR in 1941 was similarly explained by the necessity to secure access to raw materials that Germany would need in order to survive the confrontation with America's industrial power, made inevitable after the failure to force Great Britain to sue for peace in 1940. It's truly a wonderful book that, in my opinion, convincingly argues that a lot of widely held beliefs about that period of history are mistaken.
I really found Richard Marshall's interviews, in his book Philosophy at 3:AM, to be fascinating. Especially the first interview with a certain Dr. Leiter. I've been quoting what you say about the naturalist philosophers vs. the anti-naturalists (not to mention the realists vs. the moralists) constantly since last summer. It has greatly informed my own work, as well.
Joseph Carens's The Ethics of Immigration has a 2013 copyright notice, but it was only really available this year. The best book on the subject (decades in the writing) and an object lesson in how to write a work in political philosophy that is both rigorous and also accessible to non-philosophers interested in its subject matter.
Kojin Karatani's 'The Structure of World History. While I am politically of a quite different camp than Karatani, it's a book that I will be citing excessively in the next few years. Karatani's classification of modes of production throughout the development of history, and the contemporary effects and disturbances they help explain are razor sharp, or rather scalpel-sharp. Unlike the brute force theory some of neo- and post-Marxist writers propose, Karatani's approach is extremely analytically concise, while he does not overreach in terms of expected impact. It's a kind of philosophical anthropology rather than social science, and that gives us tools to think with rather than the usual declarations of intent to change the world and end with merely reifying the status quo (which Walter Mignolo recently and I think aptly criticized about the social sciences at large). But it's a heavy piece of work to read this long and dense book. But worth it.
I agree!
Sticking with pure philosophy books for the moment, I was very impressed by Stephen Finlay's Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. This roused me somewhat from my (not-very-)dogmatic moral-error-theorist slumbers. As far as it went, it convinced me on most points, and it's a book I'll definitely be taking into account (and citing) in any future work in metaethics. I also liked Pekka Vayrynen's The Lewd, the Rude, and the Nasty: A Study of Concepts in Ethics (and will be considering and citing it).
I finally read Derek Parfit's On What Matters – and although I was a bit disappointed in what seemed like a thinness (for such a thick book) in the fundamental argument, I did find much impressive analysis that I'll return to.
Turning to more popular books, I liked Rebecca Goldstein's Plato at the Googleplex very much. I also liked Kenan Malik's The Quest for a Moral Compass (though I'd already read this in draft). Actually, this was a good year from my viewpoint – I read a lot of books that I found enjoyable and useful.
Marsh, Jason. "Quality of Life Assessments, Cognitive Reliability, and Procreative Responsibility." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, volume 89, issue 2 (2014).
One of the best critical responses yet to David Benatar, and a careful philosophical evaluation of the psychology of happiness. Readers interested in Nietzsche's efforts to deflect or transform the implications of those aspects of Schopenhauer's diagnosis of the human condition that they shared may find this paper resonant.
Albahari, Miri. "Insight Knowledge of No Self in Buddhism: An Epistemic Analysis." Philosophers' Imprint, volume 14, number 21 (2014).
Fascinating and lucid exploration of what the cognitive outlook might be like for a practitioner of the Buddhistic no self doctrine.
I am often not quite sure about "best" articles or books, but two very good and interesting ones that I read were “Disconnection and Responsibility: On Moore’s Causation and Responsibility,”
Legal Theory 18 (2012), 399-435, by Jonathan Schaffer (a very nice example of how careful work in metaphysics [here on causation] can be useful and important for clearing up problems in legal theory, hear showing how some of Michael Moore's work on causation lead to, at best, deeply counter-intuitive results, and how a much better approach was available)
and "Does the Government Need to Know your Sex?", by Laurie Shrage, Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 225-247 (2012), (a great example of how political philosophy can be useful in an "applied" case, and a pretty novel argument.)
Both are more than a year old, but I happened to read them just this year, really liked them and learned from them, and think they deserve more attention.
Katia Vavova's "Debunking Evolutionary Debunking", in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, helped me to see evolutionary debunking arguments in a completely different (and less flattering) light. Rarely does a paper aid my understanding of an issue in the way this one did.
And permit me an older book that I'd not known about until this year — Karen Carr's *The Banalization of Nihilism* from 1982. It's about the costs not of nihilism, exactly, but rather of our coming to view nihilism with equanimity rather than anxiety. Carr's in a religion department, but she writes in a way that should appeal to many philosophers.
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