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Philosophy · New Books Network

New Books in Philosophy

by New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Latest episodes

Showing 20 · updated from the feed

Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)

What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biologic

Sep 10
1 h 06 min

Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)

What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biologic

Sep 10
1 h 10 min

Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong con

Sep 3
1 h 00 min

Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Metasemantics studies the foundations of meaning, asking what makes it the case that certain words have the meanings that they do. But what makes metasemantic theories tr

Jul 10
1 h 05 min

Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)

Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific contributions to the develop

Jun 13
1 h 11 min

Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)

You can stock your life with important work, relationships, activities, and art, and yet, you can still ask: what's the point of it all? Almost every thinking person has

Jun 3
48 min

PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that colo

May 24
1 h 11 min

Alexander Klein, "Consciousness is Motor: William James on Mind and Action" (Oxford UP, 2025)

When it comes to consciousness, William James is well-known for his descriptions of it rather than his theory of it and its relation to the body. In Consciousness is Moto

May 10
1 h 02 min

Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)

The cybernetic tradition in cognitive science analyzes the purposive behavior of many complex systems – from sensory-guided missiles to sensory-guided animals -- in terms

Apr 10
51 min

Andrew Lister, "Justice and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Andrew Lister's Justice and Reciprocity (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justi

Apr 5
1 h 07 min

Catherine Elgin, "Epistemic Ecology" (MIT Press, 2025)

Humans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In Epistemic Ecology (MIT Press, 2025),

Mar 3
56 min

John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophic

Feb 18
55 min

Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)

While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual f

Feb 10
1 h 05 min

Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding tha

Feb 1
58 min

Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structu

Jan 10
57 min

Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)

How can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to ph

Dec 16 2025
1 h 12 min

Amie Thomasson, "Rethinking Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

The word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to thin

Nov 10 2025
1 h 01 min

Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demine of the Modern Moral S

Oct 20 2025
1 h 08 min

S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)

Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was guaranteed by the wa

Oct 10 2025
56 min

Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)

Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many s

Sep 10 2025
1 h 01 min

Chart trend

Position in the Philosophy chart (US), last 90 days.

#63
all-time peak
143
days in the top 100 since Nov 2024

Chart positions

Where New Books in Philosophy ranks today in each Apple Podcasts chart (US, Oct 4, 2026).

#140 ▼ 2 Philosophy US

What listeners say

A curated, balanced selection of Apple Podcasts reviews.

I’ve been listening to new books in philosophy for the past couple of years. Unlike many reviewers, I couldn’t care less about the editing. Prof. Figdor’s questions are excellent and I’m consistently impressed by her ability to toe the line between rigorously interrogating the philosophical arguments and providing a neutral forum for the author to present their work. I’ve discovered—and had to purchase —many books through this podcast. Keep it up!

A Madin · Aug 2026

Podcasts that interview people and claim to examine complex and interesting topics are a dime a dozen, but 99% of them never go deeper than the surface level version of the topics. The New Books Network is uniquely different, and New Books In Philosophy is the best of the New Books Network. Listen to this podcast for long, in-depth interviews with people who literally wrote the book investigating a narrow slice of philosophy. (Oddly, the interviewers frequently voice assumptions that listeners are in or have been in academic philosophy. This is probably not an accurate assumption about the audience, since the podcast is distributed to the general public via iTunes. But that's trivial enough that it's barely even a criticism.)

Selylidne · Jun 2020

Very impressed with the choice of guests and quality of the conversations. This podcast provides excellent introductions to new philosophical works and thought provoking conversations with authors. Keep up the great work!

jess_simp · Mar 2019

Very interesting, but PLEASE, like many others have said in the reviews, either get rid of the “ums” and *lipsmacks* in post-editing, or have the interviewer practice not doing those things so much. It’s incredibly hard to focus on what is being said when those things are constantly ringing in your ear. Thank you! Please consider!

MuthaFcuak · Dec 2022

I am a philosophy professor who absolutely loves podcasts. I listen to several everyday and attend live recordings of podcasts every year. But this podcast is just terrible. It is not necessarily the content (although that is usually fairly boring). The issue is that the hosts cannot speak. Seriously, I am not sure what they hear when they listen to themselves but they say "um," "uh," etc. so much that it becomes impossible (for me) to listen to any philosophy. How did they get the rights to host this when it seems so difficult for them to speak English without pausing so say "um" every five seconds. If you do not believe me, just count how many times they say "um" in one minute. Can they just edit it out (like most professional hosts do) or get someone who can finish a sentence without saying "um"? C'mon, people!

RJJO · Apr 2018

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