Josh Brandt and Ben Lange’s great paper, “Partiality, Asymmetries, and Morality’s Harmonious Propensity” in PPR cleverly identifies several important asymmetries between positive and negative forms of partiality, all of which help point us to a broader and relatively under-explored fact about the way morality tends to sustain morally positive relationships. It covers a fascinating topic through succinct and powerful arguments that all point toward a broader and important conclusion. The writing is great, and it offers a lot of rich argumentation.

Elizabeth Anderson’s “Hijacked” is just incredibly good. Among other things, it shows how Locke and Adam Smith have been distorted by both right wingers and intellectuals on the left interested in scoring cheap points and suggests ways that philosophers interested in equality and the value of labor can draw on their work. (It’s actually made me excited to read Smith in the coming year). It also has a remarkably even handed treatment of Marx. Where far too many philosophers divide into either “Marx is the devil” or “Marx is the way the truth and the light…” Anderson patiently explains both what he got right and how his own views were very much limited by his larger economic environment and the particular intellectual milieu he found himself in. Beyond all that it’s refreshing in that it shows how one can do very good ethics and political philosophy by doing careful historical work. Compared to the bizarre little stories about A and B or Smith and Jones that characterize too much ethics and political philosophy it’s a massive breath of fresh air.
Lorraine Daston’s “Rules: A Short History of What We Live By” is also quite good. It’s a bit harder to summarize but it’s convinced me that we ought to be a bit more dubious than we often are that we know exactly what we mean when we talk about rules. It’s a nice social history of how and why we’ve come to see rules as inflexible algorithms when that conception of rules would have struck most people even well into the modern period as downright bizarre. (Some of the reasons are good and some are downright sinister).

I really liked Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum’s “The Best Game in Town: The Re-Emergence of the Language of Thought Hypothesis Across Cognitive Science”. https://philpapers.org/rec/QUITBG

I find that in some crowds it is more or less taken for granted that LOT died when the PDP group came on the scene. The authors of this paper make a compelling argument to the contrary, while also making clear precisely what is at stake in the debate.

I really liked Flat aesthetics : twenty-first-century American fiction and the making of the contemporary by Christian Moraru. It applies Object Oriented Ontology a-la Harman and Bogost to post-1990 American literature as a way to define the contemporary. A really interesting aspect of it is that it takes aesthetics as a first philosophy, or at least gives it primacy over ontology and ethics.

Joseph Rouse’s Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction is a masterful contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research programs drawing together normative explanatory resources, dialogical or social-practice accounts of human cognition, and empirical work in cognitive science and comparative and develophmental psychology.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo202330194.html

I haven’t read it yet, but the publication of an early manuscript of Descartes’s *Regulae*, which was discovered by Richard Serjeantson in 2011, complete with critical commentary and English translation, is surely an important event!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ren-descartes-regulae-ad-directionem-ingenii-9780199682942?cc=us&lang=en&

I’d also add, in the same vein, Tarek Dika’s *Descartes’s Method* as an important corrective to the prevailing view that Descartes’s method was some kind of Procrustean bed, or, worse, just some useless precepts that Descartes came up with to publicize his works. Instead, Dika insists that the method is an habitus, a cognitive disposition that must be sensitive to the problem at hand and thus can be applied to a variety of problems (I think the tendency to think of Descartes’s method as some kind of algorithm is related to what Lorraine Daston’s diagnosed as the prominence of the algorithm conception of rules in the last century, so that there is here some interesting work in the intersection of these problems).

Amelia Spivak’s O’Kheiluf! identifies, documents wide-spread use of, and analyzes a sui generis inference pattern so lost in antiquity that it appears no longer to have been propogated already by the time of Rav and Shmuel (second century).

Christopher Winn’s “Three Sequels to the Dialogues of Plato” and his “An Aristotelian Dialogue Concerning the Geocentric and Heliocentric Cosmologies, Contra Galileo”.
For re-introducing dialectic both as a literary style and a philosophical method.

https://archive.org/details/pdf-three-sequels-to-the-dialogues-of-plato

https://archive.org/details/an-aristotelian-dialogue-concerning-the-two-chief-cosmologies-contra-galileo