Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // News

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...

The Diversity of Morals

2026-04-29T06:16:00-0400

2026.04.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Steven Lukes, The Diversity of Morals, Princeton University Press, 2025, 256pp., $29.95 (hbk) ISBN 9780691157191.

Reviewed by Jussi Suikkanen, University of Birmingham

The Diversity of Morals is a fascinating and richly interdisciplinary book. In it, Steven Lukes, professor emeritus of sociology at New York University, draws on philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political theory, history, and other social and human sciences to examine a broad range of essential questions about morality.

Chapter 1 focuses on drawing two contrasts. According to the first contrast, philosophers typically tend to believe both (i) that there is a single, objectively correct morality, and (ii) that certain moral virtues, concepts, ideals, and institutions which reflect that morality are universal. Philosophers are also here presented as holding that universal, objectively correct moral principles can be discovered merely by considering abstract thought-examples, such as the famous trolley problem.

By contrast, a minority of dissenting philosophers...

Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some

2026-04-29T06:16:00-0400

2026.04.11 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

M. Oreste Fiocco, Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some, Oxford University Press, 2024, 328pp., $132.00 (hbk) ISBN 978019777710.

Reviewed by Ulrich Meyer, Colgate University

In this ambitious book, Fiocco defends two remarkable theses. The first is the claim that the world is ontologically flat, “that each thing is fundamental; that reality has no ontological levels and […] that no thing is grounded in or made to be by another” (xv). The second is a version of the presentist thesis that nothing exists that is not present. While promoting presentism itself is not all that remarkable, Fiocco tries to make an unusually strong case. Rather than appeal to common sense or philosophical intuition, he claims to provide irrefutable, knock-down arguments for both of his theses.

These knock-down arguments are said to emerge from Fiocco’s fundamentalist approach to metaphysics, which he calls “original inquiry”. This inquiry is occasioned by confronting the...

The Logic of Entailment and its History

2026-04-19T15:29:00-0400

2026.04.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Edwin Mares, The Logic of Entailment and its History, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 280pp., $32.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781009375276.

Reviewed by Rohan French, University of California, Davis

Anderson & Belnap, in their monumental work, Entailment: the Logic of Relevance and Necessity, placed the entailment connective—a connective expressing the concept first introduced by G.E. Moore in ‘External and Internal Relations’ as the converse of deducibility—at the heart of logic. They argued that the entailment connective should be both relevant, avoiding the paradoxes of implication, as well as modal, avoiding the so-called paradoxes of modality. Their argument for the relevant logic E being the correct logic of entailment turned on it being the logic that arose from imposing a S4-style restriction on the Fitch-style natural deduction system for the relevant logic R, viewed there as the correct logic of contingent relevant implication. In fact, Meyer showed that, at least in the implicational fragment, E...

Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness

2026-04-19T15:14:00-0400

2026.04.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Joseph Stenberg, Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 334pp., $120.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781108478434.

Reviewed by Angela Knobel, University of Dallas

In Aquinas on the Ethics of Happiness, Joseph Stenberg sets out to offer the reader what he describes as a “big-picture reconstruction” of the fundamental elements of Aquinas’s ethics. Stenberg wishes to offer an account of Aquinas’s ethics, which—in his view—is distinctively different from, and at odds with, the “standard” description of it. Specifically, against the “very widely held” view that for Aquinas, “moral norms and moral virtues are fundamentally determined by their relationship to individual happiness”, Stenberg wishes to argue that Aquinas “removes individual happiness from the core of eudaimonism and puts common happiness in its place”, thus “changing the focus of eudaimonistic ethics from the happiness of the individual to the happiness of the whole community” (9).

Stenberg works towards this account by first...

Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Theories of Quantum Gravity

2026-04-18T08:10:00-0400

2026.04.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Christian Wüthrich and Nick Huggett, Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Theories of Quantum Gravity, Oxford University Press, 2025, 384pp., $115.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198758501.

Reviewed by Álvaro Mozota Frauca, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Could spacetime appear from something non-spatiotemporal? Different approaches to quantum gravity seem to suggest so, and Christian Wüthrich and Nick Huggett have been trying to understand how for more than 25 years now. Along the way, they have produced high-quality publications and organized research projects, workshops, and conferences that have attracted the attention of the philosophy of physics community to a highly technical, yet philosophically rich area. Their book Out of Nowhere condenses this work in a very readable way, making it accessible and valuable to both newcomers and experts.

Throughout the book, Wüthrich and Huggett argue that it is possible to have a world without spacetime at its most fundamental level of description, but in which spacetime “emerges” as some approximate or effective description. For...

A Pluralist Theory of Perception

2026-04-13T15:05:42-0400

2026.04.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Neil Mehta, A Pluralist Theory of Perception, MIT Press, 2024, 358pp., $50.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780262548281.

Reviewed by Kranti Saran, Ashoka University

Veridically perceiving an ovoid yellow mango in ordinary circumstances differs from hallucinating a matching scene. In hallucination, there is no mango. Yet these experiences look exactly alike. How should philosophers account for this pattern of sameness and difference? Representationalists argue that both cases involve representing the world to be the same way, but only veridical perception represents successfully. Naïve realists argue that only veridical perception involves a primitive nonrepresentational relation to its targets, a relation hallucination lacks. Naïve realist accounts of their sameness vary. These standard views do not exhaust the alternatives. Since at least Byrne and Logue (2008), the literature has spawned novel proposals that seek to capture the insights of both standard views. Since at least Bengson et al. (2011), those proposals include...

Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology

2026-04-13T15:05:35-0400

2026.04.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Dhananjay Jagannathan, Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2025, 226pp., $99.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197781487.

Reviewed by Christiana Olfert, Tufts University

Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology is Dhananjay Jagannathan’s interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom. It is of interest to scholars and students of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, to those interested in virtue epistemology, and to those interested in the epistemology and ethics of understanding.

In the vein of recent work on epistêmê as understanding (for example, Moravcsik 1979, Burnyeat 1980 and 1981, Annas 1981, Schwab 2016 and 2020, Moss 2020),Jagannathan’s thesis is that Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom (phronêsis) should be interpreted as practical understanding. Jagannathan’s main strategy in the book is to argue from contrasts. By showing how practical wisdom is unlike a range of other epistemic states related to the human good (such as an intuitive sense of what to do; ethical...

Debating Transcendence: Creatio ex nihilo and Sheng Sheng

2026-04-09T18:20:00-0400

2026.04.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Bin Song, Debating Transcendence: Creatio ex nihilo and Sheng Sheng, Fordham University Press, 2026, 336pp., $40.00 (pbk) ISBN 9781531512095.

Reviewed by Leah Kalmanson, University of North Texas

Bin Song enters longstanding debates over the status of transcendence as a concept in Chinese thought with a book that offers clarity, nuance, and a compelling theoretical intervention. In facing the question of whether Chinese thought has a concept of transcendence, voices on opposing sides often claim the same underlying commitment. Those who answer “yes” are often aligning themselves against Eurocentrism, that is, against the idea that European thought has privileged access to certain philosophical or religious insights. Yet those who answer “no” are also often aligning themselves against Eurocentrism. That is, they are making the point that we should not import terms and categories from European discourses into Chinese ones but rather should learn and utilize indigenous concepts and frameworks.

Entering these complex dynamics,...

Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections

2026-04-09T17:52:00-0400

2026.04.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Alexander Guerrero, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, Oxford University Press, 2024, 464pp., $45.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780198938989.

Reviewed by Amanda Greene, University of California Santa Barbara

Many scholars working on democracy today draw our attention only to its upsides or its downsides—the dream or the nightmare. But Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections is an admirable exception. While he recognizes that the positive and negative potentials of democracy are intimately related, he gives us reason to hope that we can avoid the worst. His analysis unfolds in two parts. The first part diagnoses the failures of electoral democracy, and the second defends an alternative in which randomly selected citizens are empowered to make political decisions. As he envisions it, such a system would be composed of 20 ‘single-issue lottery-selected legislatures’ (SILLs)—hence the name ‘lottocracy’. Each of these bodies would comprise 450 members set to deliberate about and decide on policies for their...

Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason

2026-04-06T12:20:00-0400

2026.04.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Melissa Zinkin, Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, Oxford University Press, 2024, 296pp., $99.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197786802.

Reviewed by Anastasia Berg, University of California, Irvine

In his review of Susan Neiman’s The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (1997), an early entry in the “unity of reason in Kant” scholarly genre, Paul Guyer complained that the things Neiman describes as evidence for Kant’s single conception of reason, one account which can unify the apparently disparate realms of inquiry—theory and practice—and, correspondingly, being—nature and freedom—were “really similarities in our use of reason in the various areas of our inquiry and conduct.” (Guyer, 1997, 292). With this, Guyer set a basic standard for any subsequent attempt to answer the vexing question of the unity of practical and speculative reason in Kant. The question, to be sure, is Kant’s own. The “two separate systems” of philosophy, that of nature and that of freedom, are,...

The Ethics of Public Health Paternalism

2026-03-28T10:37:00-0400

2026.03.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

T. M. Wilkinson, The Ethics of Public Health Paternalism, Oxford University Press, 2025, 256pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198895817.

Reviewed by Catelynn Kenner, Independent Scholar and Daniel Story, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Martin Wilkinson’s book The Ethics of Public Health Paternalism is a normative analysis of paternalistic governmental policies within liberal democracies that aim at improving adults’ health. Wilkinson is largely critical of paternalistic interventions, especially preventive interventions that restrict choice by imposing costs on or removing unhealthy options, and of arguments in favor of these interventions commonly advanced within public health. Wilkinson’s critiques primarily focus on interventions relating to tobacco, alcohol, and obesity and orbit two main points. The first is that, contrary to what is often tacitly assumed within public health, health is neither a supreme value nor the same as wellbeing; improvements in health do not necessarily lead to improvements in wellbeing, and, in fact, interventions that make people healthier can make them all-things-considered worse...