Falvey Library receives new philosophy books every day, and you never know when something exciting, important or serendipitous will appear. Here are a few of the latest.

The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage by Catherine Malabou (Fordham University Press)

From the publisher: “This book employs a philosophical approach to the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology, focused on the issue of trauma and psychic wounds. It thereby reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center.The “new wounded” suffer from psychic wounds that traditional psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the psyche’s need to integrate events into its own history, cannot understand or cure. They are victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. … Effacing the limits that separate “neurobiology” from “sociopathy,” brain damage tends also to blur the boundaries between history and nature. At the same time, it reveals that political oppression today assumes the guise of a traumatic blow stripped of all justification. We are thus dealing with a strange mixture of nature and politics, in which politics takes on the appearance of nature, and nature disappears in order to assume the mask of politics.”

Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting by Sianne Ngai (Harvard University Press)

From the publisher: “The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.”

The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition by Axel Honneth (Polity)

From the publisher: “In this volume Axel Honneth deepens and develops his highly influential theory of recognition, showing how it enables us both to rethink the concept of justice and to offer a compelling account of the relationship between social reproduction and individual identity formation. Drawing on his reassessment of Hegel’s practical philosophy, Honneth argues that our conception of social justice should be redirected from a preoccupation with the principles of distributing goods to a focus on the measures for creating symmetical relations of recognition. This theoretical reorientation has far-reaching implications for the theory of justice, as it obliges this theory to engage directly with problems concerning the organization of work and with the ideologies that stabilize relations of domination. In the final part of this volume Honneth shows how the theory of recognition provides a fruitful and illuminating way of exploring the relation between social reproduction and identity formation. Rather than seeing groups as regressive social forms that threaten the autonomy of the individual, Honneth argues that the ‘I’ is dependent on forms of social recognition embodied in groups, since neither self-respect nor self-esteem can be maintained without the supportive experience of practising shared values in the group.”

Heidegger and Cognitive Science edited by Julian Kiverstein and Michael Wheeler (Palgrave MacMillan)

From the publisher: “The cognitive scientists of today are increasingly occupied with investigating the ways in which human cognition depends on the dynamic interaction over multiple time scales of brain, body and world. The old vision of the mind as a logic machine whose workings could be explained in abstraction from the biological body and the cultural environment is looking increasingly untenable and outdated. This collection explores the idea that this development in cognitive science can be productively interpreted through an encounter with Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Not only can Heidegger help us to understand the history of cognitive science but his philosophy also provides a conceptual framework for the cognitive science of today and of the future. Heidegger, however, is standardly interpreted as being resolutely anti-naturalist, as insisting that a scientific understanding of human beings is necessarily limited and partial in what it can tell us about human existence. Can there be a cognitive science of human existence or is such a project doomed to fail for reasons already articulated in Heidegger’s philosophy?”

Against the Physicists by Sextus Empiricus – a new translation by Richard Bett (Cambridge University Press)

From the publisher: “Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Physicists examines numerous topics central to ancient Greek inquiries into the nature of the physical world, covering subjects such as god, cause and effect, whole and part, bodies, place, motion, time, number, coming into being and perishing and is the most extensive surviving treatment of these topics by an ancient Greek sceptic. Sextus scrutinizes the theories of non-sceptical thinkers, and generates suspension of judgement through the assembly of equally powerful opposing arguments. Richard Bett’s edition provides crucial background information about the text and elucidation of difficult passages. His accurate and readable translation is supported by substantial interpretative aids, including a glossary and a list of parallel passages relating Against the Physicists to other works by Sextus. This is an indispensable edition for advanced students and scholars studying this important work by an influential philosopher.”

The new issue of Expositions, the interdisciplinary journal of the Villanova Center for Liberal Education, features a number of selections that will be of particular interest to students and scholars of philosophy:

Expositions Vol. 6, No. 2 (2012)
V.C.L.E. is pleased to announce the publication of “Expositions” Vol. 6, No. 2. There is an interview with Alasdair MacIntyre (conducted after his recent visit to Villanova). An Academic Roundtable on Daryn Lehoux’s recent work in the history and philosophy of science, “What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking.” A discussion of teaching Cervantes’ masterpiece, “Don Quixote,” and a review of Brad Gregory’s “The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.”

For additional information: http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/
If you have questions, please contact: gregory.hoskins@villanova.edu

By Nikolaus Fogle

Let’s say you’re taking a course on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. You’ve gone to the lectures, read your textbook, maybe a few articles, and now it’s time to start working on your term paper. You know you need to dig deeper, and you want sources that will provide insight while also helping you identify the key points of dispute about Kant, so you can intelligently enter the debate. This is when you turn to The Cambridge Companion to Kant.

The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture—171 volumes at last count—provide a wealth of resources to students and scholars alike. Each one is devoted to a specific figure, period, or topic, and helps readers break into the serious scholarship on that subject.

There are Cambridge Companions to Plato, Nietzsche, Marx and Jung, to Arabic philosophy, the Scottish enlightenment, and postmodern theology, to name a few. The series ranges broadly, as titles like The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Skepticism and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture testify. There are even a couple of surprisingly specific ones, like The Cambridge Companion to Nozik’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

They’re ideal resources for term papers, since each volume is carefully curated to inform and advance the scholarship at the same time. The contributors are most often internationally-recognized authorities on their subjects. For instance, The Cambridge Companion to Kant is edited and introduced by Paul Guyer, the author of at least eight books on Kant, and one of the principle translators of Kant into English. It also includes essays by a dozen other Kant experts, each focusing on a particular facet of his thought.

Finally, the bibliographies at the end of each volume are ready road-maps to some of the most important literature on their subjects. Sometimes they’re even broken down into thematic sections, e.g., books and articles on Kant’s moral theory, his anthropology, his philosophy of religion, etc.

So as you write your term papers this semester, give the Cambridge Companions a try. Falvey has both the print and digital editions of nearly every one.

By Nikolaus Fogle

Philosophy is a pretty esoteric field of study. For beginning students the wilderness of names, schools, -isms, and assorted jargon can seem to stretch on forever. Often the best way to get oriented is to start with an encyclopedia article.

Falvey Library provides access to an extensive selection of philosophy reference resources, the majority of which are accessible online. These range from large, general works like the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to more specialized ones like the Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy and A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. In nearly all cases the entries are penned by respected scholars who are experts in their fields, so you can be confident that you’re getting top notch knowledge.

Philosophy encyclopedias aren’t just for newcomers, either. Veterans of philosophy will find them helpful too, when they need to refresh their memories about an infrequently used term, or when the search for knowledge carries them into previously unplumbed depths. The encyclopedias  also make great leisure reading for the intellectually curious. Seriously. You can learn an awful lot about, say, psychoanalysis, or Derrida, or stoicism, in about twenty minutes. Think of them as a Wikipedia for philosophy that you can actually trust. Here are the three most inclusive ones:

Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the old workhorse. Falvey currently has both the print and online versions of the 2nd edition, revised in 2006. Its 2,100+ entries cover philosophy from a range of perspectives: there are entries about individual philosophers, entries devoted to various national and regional traditions, as well as ones about specific historical movements, concepts and terms. In the first volume, for instance, you’ll find articles on aesthetics, African philosophy, alterity, Anaxagoras, and artificial intelligence (among other things). As with the Routledge encyclopedia, the bibliographies that accompany each article tend to be useful and manageably sized. The online version is accessible through the Gale Virtual Reference Library, and articles can be viewed in text or PDF formats.

If you’re looking for an insightful first encounter with almost any topic in philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the place to go. It’s more exhaustive than Stanford, and easier to use than Macmillan. The articles are informative, consistent, and push the reader just a bit toward a deeper understanding of their topic. They also put the most essential information up front, or on the first page, leaving it up to you whether you want to delve deeper or not. The interface is simple and flexible: you can browse for articles by subject, and perform basic or advanced searches.  There is also a glossary component that gives brief descriptions of specialized terms, and within each article there is a tab that lists related entries. The only downside of the Routledge encyclopedia is that there is no option for a PDF view, which would make for easier reading.

Finally, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a web-only, continuously-updated encyclopedia that anyone can access. It’s also fully peer-reviewed and the articles are contributed by some of the leading figures in their fields. The SEP tends to assume a higher level of familiarity with philosophy than other encyclopedias, and this can be daunting for newcomers. Authors tend to delve into fine-grained analyses of their topics, more in the style of a journal article than an encyclopedia. And not infrequently they break out long stretches of formal logic. That said, you’ll probably walk away from an SEP article with a deeper understanding of a topic than you otherwise would. The SEP is the place to go for special topics in analytic philosophy, such as rigid designators or zombies, that won’t be covered in much detail by Routledge or MacMillan.