Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // News

Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason

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

2026.04.2 : 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...

Early Scholastic Christology 1050-1250

2026-03-26T17:09:35-0400

2026.03.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Richard Cross, Early Scholastic Christology 1050-1250, Oxford University Press, 2025, 304pp., $130.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198936015.

Reviewed by Corey Barnes, Oberlin College

Cross’s impressive, textually grounded study sheds light on the mechanics and semantics of the Incarnation as debated prior to and in the wake of Peter Lombard’s codification in his Sentences of three opinions, which came to be known as the homo assumptus, subsistence, and habitus theories. While extensive attention has been devoted to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century reflections on the hypostatic union and communicatio idiomatum, including by Cross himself, far less systematic attention has been devoted to surveying the period investigated here. Cross’s study reveals how the three opinions emerged from specific approaches and remained fluid into the thirteenth-century, constituting clusters of affirmations, denials, and dispositions, rather than strictly delineated positions.

In the Afterword, Cross observes the general consensus by 1250 “that Christ’s human nature is...

Different Beasts: Humans and Animals in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi

2026-03-23T07:37:00-0400

2026.03.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Sonya N. Özbey, Different Beasts: Humans and Animals in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi, Oxford University Press, 2025, 344pp., $20.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780197841013.

Reviewed by Joshua R. Brown, Mount St. Mary’s University

A significant presupposition of many in the modern ecological movement is that current environmental crises can be laid at the feet of some of the basic commitments of Western philosophy, particularly those indebted to the Christian era. Substance ontology, metaphysical dualism, “essentialism”, and the conception of humans as uniquely rational among other animals are among the most often cited sources of trouble. Hence, turning to philosophical figures who appear to undo these normative claims has been a growing feature of postmodern Western philosophy engaged in environmental activism. As the West has entered its era of climate change awareness and environmental activism in recent decades, scholars of Chinese philosophy have especially looked to the Daoist tradition in order to cultivate new resources to address these issues.

...

Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity

2026-03-23T07:34:00-0400

2026.03.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Omnisubjectivity: An Essay on God and Subjectivity, Oxford University Press, 2023, 224pp., $35.99 (hbk) ISBN 9780197682098.

Reviewed by Sabrina B. Little, The Ohio State University

Does God know my present joy, as it is experienced by me in all of my creaturely constraints? In Omnisubjectivity, Linda Zagzebski answers in the affirmative. She argues that God is omnisubjective, having the property of perfectly grasping all conscious states of every conscious being from the first-person perspective of the subject. Omnisubjectivity is compelling, clear, and interesting. It is valuable both for the view it advances and for introducing readers to a tradition of inquiry on Divine attributes in classical theism. In what follows, I provide an overview of Zagzebski’s arguments, raising questions that these arguments generate along the way.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the concept of subjectivity, defined as “consciousness as it is experienced by the subject of conscious states” (1). Zagzebski raises...

The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees

2026-03-19T06:57:00-0400

2026.03.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Bradley Hillier-Smith, The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees, Routledge, 2025, 286 pp., $61.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781032833651.

Reviewed by Michael Blake, University of Washington

The concept of the refugee is currently under several distinct forms of pressure. Populists, in many wealthy states, have demonized the figure of the refugee and have succeeded in mobilizing popular opposition to the legal rights of refugees. Public support for the rights of refugees is at, or near, an all-time low. Philosophers, for their part, have increasingly begun to question whether refugees—as defined in contemporary legal instruments—represent a morally coherent group; the concept of the refugee, on this view, is best understood as an historic response to the atrocities of the 20th century and might be inadequate as a theoretical guide to such contemporary phenomena as climate migration and internal displacement.

Bradley Hillier-Smith’s book is thus both welcome and timely. It defends a robust...

Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros

2026-03-12T11:13:30-0400

2026.03.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Federica Gregoratto, Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros, Columbia University Press, 2025, 280 pp., $35.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780231217637.

Reviewed by Matteo Santarelli, University of Bologna

In her ambitious Love Troubles: A Philosophy of Eros, Federica Gregoratto takes on the challenging task of presenting a critical and intricate philosophy of eros that is both normative and not reducible to simplistic, Manichaean polarizations. To accomplish this, the author makes three main theoretical moves. First, she takes a stance that is neither overly romantic nor dismissive. In other words, she takes a critical approach that does not diminish the power and political significance of love. Secondly, she affirms the inherently ambivalent nature of loving bonds. Thirdly, she focuses on the erotic dimension of love, thereby excluding familial and parental bonds but including friendships. These three moves have significant consequences. Most importantly, there are no unproblematic conceptions of love. In other words, troubledness is an...

Deleuze and the Problem of Experience: Transcendental Empiricism

2026-03-12T08:13:00-0400

2026.03.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Dror Yinon, Deleuze and the Problem of Experience: Transcendental Empiricism, Bloomsbury, 2025, 272pp., $115.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781350450608.

Reviewed by George Webster, University of Oxford

Dror Yinon’s Deleuze and the Problem of Experience offers one of the most sustained and systematic Kantian reconstructions of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968/1994) to date. The book’s principal claim is that transcendental empiricism—the positive thesis articulated by Deleuze throughout the course of his book—must be read as emerging from a critical engagement with Kant’s transcendental idealism. On this account, Deleuze embraces the framework of transcendental philosophy but de-emphasises the notion of a transcendental subject whose categories unify and structure ordinary experience. Deleuze, in other words, regards the experiencing subject as part of experience’s structure and thus as part of the explananda rather than the explanans. Thus, he aims to describe a transcendental field, characterised by a dynamic of repetition and difference, that generates experience...

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Guide

2026-02-28T07:45:00-0500

2026.02.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Rex Welshon, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Guide, Oxford University Press, 2023, 296pp., $30.99 (pbk) ISBN 9780197611821.

Reviewed by Guy Elgat, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Rex Welshon’s book comes at the crest of a wave of publications on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, which started, I think it is fair to say, with Brian Leiter’s classic 2002 book, Nietzsche on Morality.^[1]

The question then naturally arises regarding the need for yet another book on the subject, and part of the answer, of course, depends on who one considers the proper readership of the book to be. On the back cover, it says that the book ‘introduces readers of all levels to the major arguments found in the Genealogy’, and if one indeed regards the book merely as an introduction, then it succeeds quite nicely, though the question still remains whether earlier guides could not serve the...

Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations

2026-02-28T07:41:00-0500

2026.02.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Barry Loewer, Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations, Oxford University Press, 2024, 160 pp., $60.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198907695.

Reviewed by Craig Callender, University of California San Diego

This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as asking what makes some propositions laws of nature, Barry Loewer’s book provides an answer: the activity of science. Not God, powers, dispositions, essences, capacities, or primitives. Loewer instead develops a sophisticated “Humean” answer that grounds the origin of nomological modality in scientific practice.

Thirty years ago, Loewer defended a theory of laws of nature inspired by David Lewis (1996). Since then, he has become a champion of all things Humean in the metaphysics of science—from laws to chances to counterfactuals to explanation—and he has helped shape the field as we know it today. Bouncing off Lewis’s rich project, Loewer is, like...

The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism

2026-02-25T15:58:00-0500

2026.02.8 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Allan Hazlett, The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism, Oxford University Press, 2024, 192pp., $90.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198889830.

Reviewed by Alex Gregory, The University of Southampton, UK

In this excellent book, Hazlett pursues two main goals. First, to defend the idea that desires have accuracy conditions—he says that a desire is accurate only if its object is good. Second, to explain, and provide some kind of solution to, “the problem of nihilism”. What is this problem of nihilism? The basic idea is that if nihilism were true—if nothing were good—then all of our desires would be irrational. But it might seem that even if nihilism were true, it would still be ok to have some desires.

Part of what motivates Hazlett in the first goal above is the idea that epistemology has historically been focused on belief, and made great progress, but similar issues arise with respect to other attitudes, such as...

Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind

2026-02-23T13:47:00-0500

2026.02.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Gualtiero Piccinini (ed.), Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, Routledge, 2025, 332pp., $200.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032602981.

Reviewed by Rex Welshon, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

According to urban myth, Patricia Churchland would sometimes scold other philosophers of mind by saying, “If you knew anything about neuroscience, you’d have to know that what you’re defending is false”. These fourteen essays, edited and introduced by Gualtiero Piccinini, support a complementary claim: if you know nothing about neuroscience, you can’t know that what you’re defending is true.

In his opening essay, Piccinini lays out an argumentative framework for understanding the debates between autonomist and reductionist views of the mind. Many non-reductive views of the mind—he names computationalism, connectionism, situationism, and normativism—advocate that mental processes can be explained autonomously from neuroscience. Piccinini thinks these autonomist views are mistaken and “need to go” (3). However, most reductive views of the mind fare no better, for...

Also a History of Philosophy, Vol: III: Rational Freedom: Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge

2026-02-14T08:27:00-0500

2026.02.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Jürgen Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, Vol: III: Rational Freedom: Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Polity Press, 2025, 560 pp., $45.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781509558650.

Reviewed by Andrew Buchwalter, University of North Florida

In 2019, Jürgen Habermas published with Suhrkamp Press his 1700-plus page Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. The work appeared in two volumes, subtitled: (1) The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge and (2) Rational Freedom: Traces of Discourses on Faith and Reason. In the English language, Also a History of Philosophy (AHP), masterfully translated by Ciarin Cronin, is published by Polity Press in three volumes: (1) The Project of Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking (2022); (2) The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge (2024); and (3) Rational Freedom. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge (2025).

The review that follows focuses on Volume III of the English translation. First, I provide an overview of some of the work’s more important claims. Then I pose some questions,...

Al-Ghazālī & the Ideal of Godlikeness

2026-02-09T19:23:00-0500

2026.02.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Sophia Vasalou, Al-Ghazālī & the Ideal of Godlikeness, Oxford University Press, 2025, 224pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198912446.

Reviewed by Janne Mattila, University of Helsinki

Virtue ethics typically provides no decision algorithm to determine a right action. Instead of rules or principles, we have the claim that a good act is the one a virtuous person would characteristically choose. Moral exemplars therefore play a prominent role; exemplarist virtue ethics even makes them the sole criteria for goodness. If we accept that God is a perfectly good being, God should be the ultimate moral exemplar. God might also be the strangest, and, arguably, the most unattainable, model for morality. Vasalou’s book presents a nuanced exploration of the divine moral exemplar, not only in the thought of the influential Sunnite theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), as the title suggests, but in his theological and philosophical contexts, extending from Plato to the medieval Islamic...

Confucian Comparative Political Philosophy

2026-02-09T16:32:00-0500

2026.02.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Yong Li, Confucian Comparative Political Philosophy, Routledge, 128pp., $200.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781032671871.

Reviewed by Yutang Jin, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong

In philosophical works, it is difficult to combine bold innovation with intellectual humility. The reason is straightforward—to show creativity, an author is tempted to grandstand about their originality. I consider Yong Li’s Confucian Comparative Political Philosophy one of the rare cases where the author successfully combines each of these two virtues without sacrificing the other. This book is a recent intervention in contemporary Confucian political theory, an increasingly important field that connects the Confucian intellectual tradition and cultural practices to normative questions in political theory. Written with exceptional analytical rigor and high accessibility, this book can serve as an ideal reference point for scholars and students of Confucian political philosophy. It can also appeal to a wider audience interested in the insights of Confucian philosophy and...

The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment

2026-02-06T09:47:00-0500

2026.02.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Herman Cappelen, The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment, Oxford University Press, 2023, 244pp., $84.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198886518.

Reviewed by Jason Brennan, Georgetown University

When I first started tinkering in democratic theory, I read a book (I’ll decline to identify which) in which the author investigated what it takes to conduct a particular activity in a democratic manner. Unsurprisingly, the answer involved adopting the author’s own substantive and convoluted ideological commitments. Rather than arguing directly that these commitments were correct or good, the author tried to smuggle them into the concept of “democracy” itself, pushing the line that everyone who cares about democracy thereby implicitly shares the author’s controversial commitments. Of course, that’s false, but it relieved the author of having to produce a real argument. After reading that book, I developed a suspicion that the concept of “democracy” is often abused to bypass real debate.

Herman Cappelen’s densely argued...

From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View: Essays on Freedom, Rationality and Human Nature

2026-02-02T08:16:00-0500

2026.02.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Nancy Holmstrom, From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View: Essays on Freedom, Rationality and Human Nature, Brill, 2024, 316 pp., $136.00 (hbk) ISBN 9789004703261.

Reviewed by Sonia Maria Pavel, Clemson University

From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View is a must-read not only for social and political thinkers but for any student of the social world interested in freedom and justice. In this far-ranging twelve-essay volume, Nancy Holmstrom brings together decades of work on the key questions of the Marxist-feminist tradition.

The theoretical core of the book, and the theme of the first part, is the concept of a ‘mode of production’. In the first chapter, Holmstrom characterizes a mode of production as having “certain kinds of structures and tendencies, a certain nature” (13). This nature sets limits on what kinds of changes are possible within that society. For example, capitalism’s “built-in imperative” for profit maximization constrains the realization of both gender and race equality and of...

Mary Shepherd’s An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect

2026-02-02T08:16:00-0500

2026.02.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Don Garrett (ed.), Mary Shepherd’s An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Oxford University Press, 2024, 176pp., $29.95 (pbk) ISBN 9780197649633.

Reviewed by Samuel C. Rickless, University of California San Diego

In his Memoirs of 1879, the well-read philosopher and radical Robert Blakey, who had published a four-volume History of the Philosophy of Mind in 1848, described Mary Shepherd (1777-1847) thus: “She was, without exception, the most eloquent female talker I ever met with. Her lengthened sentences, uttered with great distinction, were quite stunning, and filled one with amazement at the subtility of her mind” (Blakey 1879, 159). Shepherd was not only a stunningly eloquent talker but also an author of stunning philosophical acumen and ambition.

Don Garrett’s book is a modern edition of Mary Shepherd’s “An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect” (1824), to which are appended two essays of hers that appeared in 1828, “Observations by Lady Mary Shepherd on [John Fearn’s] the ‘First...

Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles

2026-01-27T17:09:18-0500

2026.01.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Ulf Hlobil and Robert Brandom, Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles, Routledge, 2025, 354 pp., $45.59 (pbk) ISBN 9781032360775.

Reviewed by John Horty, University of Maryland

Robert Brandom has long advocated an approach to language and logic based on a unique combination of inferentialism and expressivism. While inferentialism is often explored within proof-theoretic semantics, typically leading to a constructivist view of mathematics, Brandom’s version centers around empirical language and incorporates a distinctive normative component. Sentences are supposed to get their meanings by being embedded in a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. A speaker making a claim can be challenged by an opponent with reasons to the contrary; the proponent of the original claim, as a condition for maintaining that claim, is required to defend it with supporting reasons, which can themselves be challenged, requiring further defense. The meaning of the original claim, then, is supposed to be determined...

The Politics of Language

2026-01-25T14:59:00-0500

2026.01.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

David Beaver & Jason Stanley, The Politics of Language, Princeton University Press, 2023, 520pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691181981.

Reviewed by Paul Catapang-Podosky, Macquarie University

“Do what’s easy first; deal with the harder stuff later”. I heard this routinely when introduced to the philosophy of language. It was offered as an explanation, perhaps even an apology, for why the discipline was slow to engage with the political dimensions of language, at least in the analytic tradition. The thought was that once we had settled the fundamentals, such as reference, truth-conditions, compositionality, the messier questions about power and ideology would simply fall into place.

Whatever its initial plausibility, the promise now rings hollow. The philosophy of language has become extraordinarily sophisticated in its treatment of representation, while remaining strikingly thin in its description of how language actually shapes social life—though, there is a contemporary surge in interest in this area, with...