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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...

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...