Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics

21. March 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.03.27 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (eds.), Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2018, 235pp., $65.00, ISBN 9780198783886. Reviewed by Oliver Thorndike, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore This book brings together eleven essays on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Metaphysica. Understanding the influence of Baumgarten's philosophical thought on Kant (who adopted Baumgarten's textbooks for his lectures), but also comprehending Baumgarten's thinking in its own right within the broader Leibnizian-Wolffian framework, has drawn growing attention in recent scholarship. Yet a systematic study of Baumgarten's notoriously difficult Metaphysica has remained a desideratum, and so this very welcome volume provides much needed guidance. In their introduction, the editors, Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers, express the hope that this collection will go some distance toward providing a commentary on Baumgarten's Metaphysica which Baumgarten himself might have envisioned but never wrote. (6) The... Read [More]
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White Supremacists vs Muslims

20. March 2019 Philosophy News News
After the terrorist attack by an apparent white nationalist in New Zealand, President Trump was offered the opportunity to strongly condemn white supremacists. He declined to do so. While white supremacists killed more Americans in 2017 than another other domestic extremist group, authorities are often reluctant to treat them as terrorists. For example, they are [More]
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Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being

19. March 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.03.25 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews John Harfouch, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, SUNY Press, 2018, 232pp., $85.00 (hbk), IBSN 9781438469959. Reviewed by Julie Walsh, Wellesley College At the outset of this book, John Harfouch tells his reader that he intends for his study to "engage and overturn the philosophy of mind" (xxxii). He aims to do this by excavating the "historical roots of a mind-body problem," which reveals another mind-body problem, a problem of, as Harfouch puts it, racial non-being (xxxiii). This excavation, in his view, displaces the traditional mind-body problem typically associated with René Descartes, which, as a result, displaces the traditional solutions to and the traditional experts of the Cartesian problem, as well as the resources that those experts command. In my view, he succeeds in this aim. The book's most obvious audience includes Descartes scholars, historians of philosophy... Read [More]
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