Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // News

Science for a Fragile World

2026-06-30T14:37:00-0400

2026.06.11 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Robert Northcutt, Science for a Fragile World, Oxford University Press, 2025, 224pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780192849083.

Reviewed by Adrian Currie, Exeter University

Maybe the world is like an armillary sphere. Metallic balls representing celestial objects are placed just-so along spherical rings, tracing an at-first bewildering but ultimately regular dance following pre-determined longitudinal and latitudinal steps. Complex, intricate patterns are mapped out in accordance with some master plan, perhaps by some master designer, built with extraordinary care by some master metalsmith.

Such a world is beautiful, elegant, intelligible. Predictable. Ultimately: boring.

Perhaps the world is like a series of tidepools clustered atop a rocky outcrop stretching across a beach. The ocean’s flow fills and mixes the pools, while its ebb and withdrawal leave aquatic refugia. The tide sets a clock of sorts, or at least an irregular rhythm, while also mixing and randomizing, leaving a stray lobster here,...

Social Ontology

2026-06-30T14:33:00-0400

2026.06.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Brian Epstein, Social Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 84pp., $25.00 (pbk) ISBN 9781009290548.

Reviewed by Kirk Ludwig, Indiana University Bloomington

Brian Epstein’s compact eighty-seven-page Cambridge Element Social Ontology provides an impressive, ecumenical overview of the field of social ontology. Epstein characterizes social ontology as concerned, in the first instance, with addressing the ‘What is X?’ question, with ‘X’ replaced by a term about a social object, kind, category, etc. For example, what is a corporation, what is race, what are group attitudes, what is law? No mere summary, the book’s goal is to provide a general, flexible framework for thinking about social kinds. How are inquiries characteristically structured? How can theories be compared? What are the various goals theorists of the social have (for example, ontological reduction vs. critique and amelioration)? What order can we bring to understanding how theories are constructed, and what aspects of...

Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties

2026-06-26T19:41:00-0400

2026.06.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Karl Ameriks, Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties, Oxford University Press, 2024, 242pp., $95.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198917625.

Reviewed by Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago

There are two major issues raised in Karl Ameriks’s book. The first concerns how Kant understands what human dignity is, its ground and scope, and how we should understand the proper way of acknowledging it—what Kant called “respect” for it. The second concerns

a few specific ways in which more attention needs to be given to the surprising complexity—both good and bad—of the influence of some of Kant’s central concepts concerning issues such as race, religion, nationalism, colonialism and cosmopolitanism. (3)

The range of those influenced is broader than is standard in the philosophical literature and focuses on those that “had considerable influence in the political as well as intellectual world”, figures such as J.G. Herder, H.S. Chamberlain, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Price and...

Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

2026-06-23T10:57:00-0400

2026.06.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Jeff Engelhardt, Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism, Oxford University Press, 2024, 216pp., $110.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197754191.

Reviewed by E. Díaz-León, University of Barcelona

Recently, analytic philosophy has paid increasing attention to the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theorizing in philosophy, and many philosophers have worried about the risks of problematic idealizations in philosophical theories. Engelhardt’s book, Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism, is a brilliant and much-needed contribution to this growing literature. Discussions about the dangers of ideal theories in philosophy have focused mostly on debates in political philosophy (e.g., Mills, 2005; Valentini, 2012; Hänel & Müller, 2025), although recently there has been interest in the issue in other sub-fields such as epistemology (McKenna, 2023), social ontology (Burman, 2023), and philosophy of language (Tirrell, 2018a; 2018b; Beaver & Stanley, 2023; Keiser, 2023). Discussions in philosophy of language have focused mostly on questions in pragmatics, including, for instance, the nature of...

Truth & Social Reality: A Metaphysical Inquiry

2026-06-23T10:53:00-0400

2026.06.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Aaron M. Griffith, Truth & Social Reality: A Metaphysical Inquiry, Oxford University Press, 2025, 208pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198948452.

Reviewed by Frank Hindriks, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen

Social construction talk can be used to deny that certain things are real or that they exist objectively. Anti-realists take social constructs to depend on our beliefs and regard them as little more than projections. However, social construction can also be explicated in realist terms. Aaron Griffith offers a realist account of the social construction of social reality in three steps. [1] He argues that social constructs implicate patterns of interaction in ways which mean they can be causes. [2] Furthermore, those patterns are the truth makers of social constructs. [3] Finally, truths about social constructs are not themselves socially constructed.

[1] According to John Searle (1995) and Raimo Tuomela (2002), institutional reality is constructed by means of constitutive rules that are collectively accepted. Yet,...

Plotinus. Ennead I 8. On the Nature and Source of Evil. Translation, with an Introduction, and Commentary

2026-06-13T13:54:00-0400

2026.06.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Anne Sheppard (trans. and ed.), Plotinus. Ennead I 8. On the Nature and Source of Evil. Translation, with an Introduction, and Commentary, Parmenides Publishing, 2025, $42.00 (pbk) ISBN 9798988320128.

Reviewed by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto

This volume is the eighteenth in an ongoing series of publications dating back to 2013 under the general editorial direction of John Dillon and Andrew Smith aimed at translations of and commentaries on all the treatises in Plotinus’s Enneads.^[1]The treatise I 8 is a chronologically late treatise by Plotinus, number 51, as reported by Porphyry. This fact suggests that we should be prepared to discover in the treatise a highly complex background of assumptions and arguments resulting from the many years of research, teaching, and writing that preceded, to say nothing of some 800 years or so of philosophical work that Plotinus has inherited and assimilated. To a certain extent this is true, but somewhat less than a reader coming to Plotinus for...

Johann Gottfried Herder. Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind

2026-06-13T13:54:00-0400

2026.06.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Gregory Martin Moore (trans. and ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder. Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Princeton University Press, 2024, 792pp., $80.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780691147185.

Reviewed by Courtney Fugate, Florida State University

If we would philosophize about the history of our species, let us therefore reject as far as possible all narrow forms of thought originating in the constitution of one region of the earth or the doctrines of a single school. (17)

Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind is a monumental work, and so is this masterful translation—the first in over a century—by Gregory Martin Moore. Herder’s thought is one of the central forces that shaped nearly every aspect of German intellectual life from about 1770 until well after the turn of the century. He studied under Immanuel Kant at the University of Königsberg, where he also came under the influence of his teacher's friendly rival, the...

Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology

2026-06-08T04:15:00-0400

2026.06.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Dan Zahavi, Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology, Oxford University Press, 2025, 240pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780192894489.

Reviewed by Zachary J. Joachim, Denison University

I’m late to meet you at the restaurant. You brush aside my apology on arrival, since we’re friends, and we sit down, get drinks, eventually food. On your way back from the bathroom, you sit back down saying, “We just bombed a school”. Taking in the news, we decry the state of the nation domestically, and the evil it’s wreaking abroad. “I just don’t know what this country is anymore; it doesn’t represent me.” You disagree with my claim that it doesn’t represent me, and we argue. Through argument, the conversation spills over into other matters of life, and when the bill comes, we forget about it, but when the time comes, I tell you I’ve got this one; relenting, you tell me you’re paying...

Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice

2026-06-08T04:14:00-0400

2026.06.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Jonathan Quong, Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice, Princeton University Press, 2026, 216pp., $29.95 (hbk) ISBN 9780691215648.

Reviewed by Charles Larmore, Brown University

Jonathan Quong’s new book pursues two distinct goals. As a volume in the series “Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy”, it is intended to offer a survey of some of the key issues in political philosophy, one that will engage even non-specialists having little prior acquaintance with this field. Yet it seeks to do so by focusing on only one specific problem, canvasses a number of proposed ways of handling it, and goes on to present Quong’s own solution. This dual aim might have proven impracticable in a book of less than 200 pages if the problem chosen were not as fundamental as it is, ramifying into just about every important question in political philosophy.

As the subtitle of Quong’s book indicates, the problem is that...

Political Tribalism: How It Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity

2026-06-02T11:57:00-0400

2026.06.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Allen Buchanan, Political Tribalism: How It Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity, Routledge, 2025, 196pp., $45.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781041009603.

Reviewed by Alexander Motchoulski, University of Virginia

Reflecting on the Italian fascism of his childhood some 60 years prior, Umberto Eco remarks that “behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives” (1995). Allen Buchanan’s Political Tribalism: How it Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes our Humanity picks up Eco’s thread in more ways than one. Buchanan’s subject is growing social and political division, especially in the contemporary American context (20-21). Political relations have become so much more antagonistic. Civility and toleration of disagreement (supposing they were genuinely present to begin with) have given way to incendiary rhetoric and physical violence carried out for political aims.

Why is this happening? Buchanan answers by appealing to precisely the...

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays

2026-06-02T11:55:00-0400

2026.06.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Johannes Zachhuber and Anna Marmodoro, eds., Gregory of Nyssa, On the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays, Oxford University Press, 2025, 244 pp., $110.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198897088.

Reviewed by Charlotte Köckert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg

The book under review is dedicated to a treatise written by the Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nyssa (born 335/340; died after 394). In that work, the Christian intellectual develops an original Christian cosmology based on a bold and speculative interpretation of the biblical account of creation, drawing on a wide range of philosophical concepts. To date In Hexaemeron has been known primarily within the field of Gregory of Nyssa research. However, Gregory’s philosophical exposition of the doctrine of “creation out of nothing”, his subtle theory of matter and material natures, and his contention that empirical observation of physical processes allow conclusions to be drawn about the structure of the cosmos as willed by God and ultimately about the Creator himself—“Gregory’s real theology of nature” (215)—deserve the...

Prototipos. Procesos de investigación artística sobre tecnología y vida

2026-05-29T09:51:00-0400

2026.05.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Sebastián Lomelí, Prototipos. Procesos de investigación artística sobre tecnología y vida, Libros UNAM, 2025, 200pp., $315.00 (hbk) ISBN 9786073095594.

Reviewed by Sofía Falomir Sánchez, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM

Prototypes: Artistic Research Processes on Technology and Life, as its title suggests, addresses a debate that is both sharply delimited and timely. Its central concerns lie at the intersection of the philosophy of technology, contemporary aesthetics, art involving living media, and artistic research. At a deeper level, however, the book is driven by a broader question: whether art can function, today, as a genuinely critical discourse. Sebastián Lomelí asks to what extent art can do more than simply mobilize technology: he explores how it might also problematize the technological as such, and how, rather than merely operating on living matter, it may foreground the social, political, material, and conceptual tensions through which “life” is currently understood and produced. In his words:

Concepts at the Interface

2026-05-29T09:51:00-0400

2026.05.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Nicholas Shea, Concepts at the Interface, Oxford University Press, 2024, 272pp., $90.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198893660.

Reviewed by Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh

After a 15-yearlong lull, philosophical interest in concepts is picking up again: old questions are litigated de novo (e.g., Laurence and Margolis, 2024), and new questions are investigated (e.g., Dove, 2022; McCaffrey, in press). Shea’s Concepts at the Interface is a major contribution to this renewed discussion. As one has come to expect from him, the book is crystal clear and engaging; it moves seamlessly from careful philosophical arguments to sophisticated and well-informed empirical discussions, which bring together cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. Shea’s goal is, explicitly, less to argue for specific claims about the mind than to paint a big picture about the architecture of human cognition—what forms of thinking make up human cognition, what the basic mechanisms and processes are, and how...

John Henry Newman and Contemporary Philosophy

2026-05-22T10:58:00-0400

2026.05.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Frederick D. Aquino and Joe Milburn (eds.), John Henry Newman and Contemporary Philosophy, Routledge, 2025, 276pp., $200.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032686547.

Reviewed by Christopher Hauser, The University of Scranton

This volume aims to explore, develop, and evaluate a broad range of distinctive philosophical ideas found in John Henry Newman’s various writings. While Newman’s work has long been discussed in theological and religious circles, it has only recently begun to garner the attention of analytic philosophers interested in bringing Newman’s ideas into dialogue with current discussions in areas such as epistemology, philosophy of religion, ethics, and philosophy of education. Consequently, few contemporary philosophers, even those aware of Newman’s general influence on religious thought, have considered to what extent his work might contain interesting philosophical ideas worth defending or developing in a contemporary context.

This volume seeks to rectify that. It contains twelve chapters written by an impressive roster of philosophers, most of whom are primarily...

Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration

2026-05-22T07:17:00-0400

2026.05.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Andy Hamilton, Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration, Routledge, 2024, 294pp., $54.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781138599949.

Reviewed by Joshua Heter, Jefferson College

What is the relationship (or distinction) between art and entertainment? In this monograph, Andy Hamilton attempts to carve out a “middle way” between the modernist view, that art and entertainment are mutually exclusive, and the post-modernist view, that they are indistinguishable. On Hamilton’s view, art and entertainment are complementary and interpenetrating concepts and practices where entertainment is audience-centered, aiming to delight, amuse, excite, etc., while art maintains a more complex relation to the audience with a “conscious aesthetic end, that in central cases, richly rewards aesthetic attention, in virtue of its inseparable form and content” (12).

Chapter 1 proceeds with Hamilton making the case for the existence of the artist-entertainer. Certain works can be thought of as pure entertainment (e.g., cat videos, pulp fiction stories,...

The Metaphysics of Powerful Qualities: Powerful Categoricalism and the Laws of Nature

2026-05-18T07:36:00-0400

2026.05.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Vassilis Livanios, The Metaphysics of Powerful Qualities: Powerful Categoricalism and the Laws of Nature, Routledge, 2025, 214pp., $61.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781032636894.

Reviewed by Ashley Coates, University of the Witwatersrand

The powerful qualities view is most commonly associated with C.B. Martin (1997) and John Heil’s (2003) “identity theory”, on which properties are identical to both their powerfulness and their qualitativity. This identity claim has struck many philosophers as deeply puzzling. Witness David Armstrong’s (2005: 315) reaction: “I confess that I find this totally incredible. If anything is a category mistake, it is a category mistake to identify a quality—a categorical property—and a power, essentially something that points to a certain effect.” Contemporary defenders of the powerful qualities view often share at least some of this scepticism toward Martin and Heil’s theory, while also thinking that the core idea that properties are, in some significant sense, both powerful and qualitative is worth defending. Consequently, there have...

Aristotle on What Emotions Are

2026-05-18T07:31:00-0400

2026.05.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Giles Pearson, Aristotle on What Emotions Are, Oxford University Press, 2024, 400pp., $135.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198879343.

Reviewed by Kristján Kristjánsson, University of Birmingham, U.K.

Giles Pearson’s book on Aristotle’s account of what emotions are is a majestic piece of work, which—irrespective of whether one agrees with every aspect of his exegesis—gives him pride of place among previous doyens in this area such as Fortenbaugh (2002) and Konstan (2006), and indeed makes this book the gold standard of any future work on the topic. That said, while Aristotelian aficionados will feel they have stumbled across an open goldmine, more practically minded emotion theorists may have to dig a bit deeper to appreciate the relevance of Pearson’s excavations.

Broadly speaking, philosophers are interested in three main sorts of questions about emotions: (1) the ontological question of what an emotion really is; (2) the (moral)-epistemological question of how emotions are related to...

Parmenides: New Perspectives

2026-05-14T08:28:00-0400

2026.05.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

A.G. Long and Barbara M. Sattler, eds., Parmenides: New Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2025, 218pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198909118.

Reviewed by Daniel W. Graham, Brigham Young University

This volume offers ten essays on the philosophy of Parmenides, presenting different viewpoints on perhaps the most influential and challenging Presocratic philosopher. The essays by leading international scholars deal with issues ranging from Parmenides’ use of mythological allusions to his argumentation and the impact of later thinkers on the interpretation of his thought.

In “The Way out of the World: How Parmenides Played with the Cosmology of Early Greek Poetry” (1-20), Arnaud Macé examines the mythological setting of Parmenides’ poem, in which the unnamed youth is welcomed by the daughters of Helios at the gates of the House of Night. There he meets an unnamed goddess who narrates the remainder of the poem. But where is the House of Night? Macé helpfully examines passages from...

The Limits of Liberty

2026-05-11T09:34:00-0400

2026.05.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Sarah Conly, The Limits of Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2025, 224pp., $29.95 (hbk) ISBN 9780197812372.

Reviewed by R.S. Leiby, Elon University

Sarah Conly’s third monograph makes a provocative contribution to the scholarly conversation surrounding liberty. The book takes as its starting point the intuition that we are teetering on the verge of—or perhaps even already entrenched in—a global state of emergency. This state is generated by a variety of factors (e.g., advancing anthropogenic climate change, the inevitability of further global pandemics like COVID-19, epistemic pollution through campaigns of disinformation, etc.), conceptually united by the fact that the emergencies of the moment have the potential to be species-ending. Addressing them, therefore, cannot be a project of idle curiosity or even supererogatory enthusiasm. For Conly, addressing these emergencies is and must be a central project of contemporary human life.

While such an articulation of our current state of...

Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy

2026-05-01T15:27:00-0400

2026.05.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Benjamin Miller, Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy, Routledge, 2025, 290pp., $160.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032960685.

Reviewed by Kirsten Welch, Baylor University

Character education is having a heyday. Established in 2012 at the University of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtue is just one among many organizations dedicated to furthering character education; the Centre claims to have influenced education in the UK and beyond, having formed partnerships with other character-focused organizations and individuals in over 175 countries (Harrison, 2023). The Jubilee Centre, in good company with many of its peer organizations, draws explicitly on Aristotelian foundations and centers its character education framework on concepts of human flourishing and phronesis (Jubilee Centre, 2022).

It is against this backdrop that Benjamin Miller presents the argument of his book Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy. Whereas many Aristotelians and neo-Aristotelians trot along their merry...