Some Very Good Recent Philosophy Articles
Let’s call a philosophy article “recent” if it has been published in the past five years.
And let’s call a philosophy article “very good” if you think it’s very good.
And let’s call an article a “philosophy” article if… well, I’ll let you figure that out.
This post is a place for you to share recent philosophy articles you’ve read that you thought were really good.
So:
- recommend no more than three articles
- don’t pick your own work
- please provide a link to the article, if you can
- preferably comment with your real name.
Go!
(Relatedly, I’ve been quite busy with work and other stuff this week and posting by me has been and will continue to be light. Regular posting will resume next week. Thanks for the assist, philosofriends!)
“Value Capture” 2024 by C. Thi Nguyen
https://jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/3048
Hard agree.
He also wrote a paper articulating the tensions that become palpable when the norms of expertise and of transparency are both in play:
https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12823
Nguyen seems to have a nose for finding important phenomena that hover near our collective horizon of attention and for analyzing them and explaining their significance.
I was unaware of this paper, but on the recommendation here I read it today. Thank you! I agree, it is extremely interesting and well-constructed.
“Epistemic Trespassing” (2019) by Nathan Ballantyne
https://philpapers.org/rec/BALET-2
Birch (2022): The search for invertebrate consciousness
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nous.12351
Tarsney (2023): The epistemic objection to longtermism
https://philpapers.org/rec/TARTEC-4
Levinstein and Herrmann (2024):
Still no lie detector for language models: probing empirical
and conceptual roadblocks
https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVSNL
Paulina Sliwa: “Making Sense of Things: Moral Inquiry as Hermeneutical Inquiry” https://philpapers.org/rec/SLIMSO
Ethan Nowak: “Sociolinguistic Variation, Slurs, and Speech Acts” https://philpapers.org/rec/NOWSVS-2
Joey Pollock: “Testimonial Knowledge and Content Preservation” https://philpapers.org/rec/POLTKA
I like lots of recent papers but here are three that immediately come to mind:
Rachel Fraser’s “Narrative Testimony” (https://philpapers.org/rec/FRANT-3)
Sukaina Hirji’s “Outrage and the Bounds of Empathy” (https://philpapers.org/rec/HIROAT)
Sara Aronowitz and Grace Helton’s “Subjectivity in Film: Mine, Yours, and No One’s” (https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5707/)
“The identity of what? Pluralism, practical interests, and individuation” (2024) by Dranseika, Nichols, and Shoemaker
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.13070
Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Existential Risk; Thorstadt https://philarchive.org/rec/THOTMI-5
The Atoms of Self-Control; Sripada
https://philpapers.org/rec/SRITAO-3
Efforts and Their Feelings; Bermudez & Massin
https://philarchive.org/rec/BEREAT-31
“Powers: The No-Successor Problem” (2021) by John Pemberton
https://philpapers.org/rec/PEMPTN
“Dispositions manifest themselves: an identity theory of properties” (2021) by Kristina Engelhard
https://philpapers.org/rec/ENGDMT
“Do Substances Have Formal Parts?” (forthcoming) by Graham Renz
https://philpapers.org/rec/RENDSH
Beyond the rich insights these articles provide on their subject matter, the conclusions they present – if one is convinced by them – give us reasons to rethink how we’ve being conceiving each of the notions they engage with.
radical internalism by zoe johnson king
https://doi.org/10.1111/phis.12235
See also “Radical Externalism,” by Amia Srinivasan
https://philpapers.org/rec/SRIRE-2 (published version posted by the author here: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/395srinivasan.pdf)
See also, Radical Internalism by Amia Srinivasan
Link here on the author’s website: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research.html
Myisha Cherry (2022), “On James Baldwin and Black Rage”, Critical Philosophy of Race 10(1): pp. 1-21 https://www.myishacherry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Cherry-2022_on-baldwin-and-black-rage-1.pdf
Dwight Lewis (2020), Review of John Harfouch’s Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, Leibniz Review Volume 29: pp. 129-140 https://www.pdcnet.org/leibniz/content/leibniz_2019_0029_0129_0140
Charles Mills (2021), “Locke on slavery”, in The Lockean Mind, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315099675-62/locke-slavery-charles-mills
Sorry to derail the conversation, but I would very much like to read Mills’ paper on Locke. If anyone has it, can you please email it to me at [email protected]. Thanks in advance!
sent!
Thanks to everyone who sent me the article! Much appreciated!
Would you kindly send it to me? [email protected]
No pressure, of course.
Super excited that folx have interest in the Mills article! If anybody happens to want to spend any time discussing it, please don’t hesitate to reach out! [email protected]
Got the paper. Thank you, Patrick!
Daniela Dover, “The Conversational Self” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cb8cd1c7a1fbd5a5c0fd60e/t/6244d9c8950ae6673b5aaa2f/1676486389384/Dover_The+Conversational+Self.pdf
“On the Possibility of Act Contractualism,” by Lea Bourguignon.
Argues (very forcefully) that contractualists don’t have to focus on general principles.
“The Procreative Asymmetry and the Possibility of Elusive Permission,” by Jack Spencer.
Clear, understated, and underrated. For me, this is the most intriguing discussion of dilemmas since Ruth Barcan Marcus. (Except maybe Horty’s Nous paper.)
“Why Are Racial Problems in the United States So Intractable?” by Joe Heath (reprinted & expanded in his Cooperation and Social Justice).
Heath’s paper does a great job putting American racial justice in a global context, arguing that some Americans incoherently want (Singaporean) equal outcomes through (Canadian) neutral means. I’d love to see more critical discussion of this paper – I assigned it last term, and it really got students talking.
“Consequentialists Must Kill” by Chris Howard
https://philpapers.org/rec/HOWCMK
“The Rejection of Consequentializing” by Daniel Muñoz
https://philpapers.org/rec/MUOTRO-2
“The Fine-Tuning Argument Against the Multiverse” by Kenneth Boyce and Philip Swenson
https://philpapers.org/rec/BOYTFA
The Right to Family Unification for Refugees, by Eilidh Beaton, Social Theory and Practice 49 (1): 1-28. 2023
https://philpapers.org/rec/BEATRT-6
James Baillie (2020), The Recognition of Nothingness. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45286568
“The Instrumental Value Arguments for National Self-Determination” by Hsin-Wen Lee https://philpapers.org/rec/LEETIV
“Do You Have to Reply to This Paper?” by Saul Smilansky https://philpapers.org/rec/SMIDYH
“National Partiality, Immigration, and the Problem of Double-Jeopardy” by Johann Frick (technically a book chapter but hopefully that is okay) https://philpapers.org/rec/FRINPI
Andrew Bacon and Cian Dorr, “Classicism”. https://philarchive.org/rec/BACC-8
Tim Williamson, “Epistemological consequences of Frege cases”. https://philpapers.org/rec/WILECO-5
Zach Goodsell, “Arithmetic is necessary”. https://philpapers.org/rec/GOOAIN
Since we are doing threes…
1. Oded Na’aman (2021): “The Rationality of Emotional Change: Towards a Process View” https://philarchive.org/rec/NAATRO
2. Ryan Preston-Roedder (2023): “Living with Absurdity: A Nobleman’s Guide” https://philarchive.org/rec/PRELWA
3. Lara Buchak (2021): “A Faithful Response to Disagreement” https://philarchive.org/rec/BUCAFR
Three good uns in aesthetics off the top of my head:
Alex King, “Universalism and the Problem of Aesthetic Diversity” (2024).
Robbie Kubala, “Aesthetic Practices and Normativity” (2021).
Kenneth Walden, “Legislating Taste” (2023).
Lea Ypi – Democratic Dictatorship: Political Legitimacy in Marxist Perspective
Guy Aitchison – Fragility as Strength: The Ethics and Politics of Hunger Strikes
Lucy McDonald – Please Like This Paper
Perhaps this will sound overly cautious or cynical, but I wonder to what extent this kind of post gives more platform to neglected good stuff over merely reinforcing the patterns of hype known from elsewhere (especially when recommenders use real names and one can give likes etc.). I’m leaning towards thinking that the latter is more prevalent. Of course, the hyped stuff can be (and usually is) really good, but it’s popular already and it’d be nice to have a break.
Wouldn’t it be better to “recommend 3 very good, and neglected, philosophy articles by people who you don’t know in person”?
For those of us no longer in philosophy or who otherwise don’t hear the hype, knowing what people are hyping is in itself pretty valuable—especially as experts’ hype, in general, is about as good a proxy for quality as exists. So your alternative is not better, I think. (Nor worse, mind.)
I think the worry is there’s a risk the recommendations can reinforce a ‘cool kids’ circle that is already getting more airtime than huge neglected swaths of the profession (without any prejudice to the papers already cited, many of which are (or look) excellent).
I’d like to put a plug for Marcus Arvan’s Substack, New Work in Philosophy, which regularly features new, good stuff under the radar.
And I hope this comment doesn’t bar me from giving my recommendations because I’m still refining my top 3.
If you are qualified to know if they are good, why don’t you know them in person? I get the worry about promoting one’s friends, but in subfield of philosophy, over a career, one chooses to seek out and get to know people that one thinks good.
Some of us don’t get out that much. And some of us can’t get visas to get out as much as we would like. I dont think that disqualifies us from being able to tell what is good in our area. (Tbc – I dont experience the visa problem, but I have colleagues and students who do.)
I agree, but this only shows that senior (and sociable?) philosophers with strong passports (cf. Bill’s comment) will have a harder time producing the list. It’s not that much of a limitation, I think.
“If you are qualified to know if they are good, why don’t you know them in person?”
Perhaps one simply hasn’t tried to meet them yet, or has tried to meet them in person but failed, or is qualified but relatively young in the field and thus is still meeting people for the first time, or is qualified but no longer in the profession, or… many other reasons, frankly.
Some lesser-known papers that are “very good”:
Ahmad Elabbar. (forthcoming.) “Varying Evidential Standards as a Matter of Justice”
Technically forthcoming, but is available in BJPS’s long queue of accepted articles. Argues that considerations of justice provide institutions like the IPCC good grounds for varying their evidential standards.
Don Fallis and Peter Lewis. 2021. “Accuracy, conditionalization, and probabilism”
Not sure if we’re in the second or third wave of criticisms of the accuracy-dominance argument; regardless, for my money this is one of the more interesting ones.
Hannah Rubin. 2022. “Structural causes of citation gaps”
For me, the main interest here is that the formal model shows how various suggestions for replacing peer review could serve to further entrench (bad) citation and attention patterns.
Icard, “Why be random?”
Wilkinson, “Flummoxing expectations”
Morton, “Reasoning under scarcity“
Jennifer Nagel Epistemic Territory
Noah Fridman-Biglin Regrounding the Unworldly: Carnap’s Politically Engaged Logical Pluralism
Katrina Forrester ‘feminist demands and the problem of housework https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/katrinaforrester/files/forrester_feminist_demands_and_the_problem_of_housework_2022.pdf
Not exactly articles, but Kant’s trilogy is very good. Lots of fanart as well.
But, the titles are so off-putting. I expect that nobody will read them and their prestige will be low.
“Interpretative Expressivism: A Theory of Normative Belief” by James L. D. Brown
https://philpapers.org/rec/BROIEA-9
“The Deontic, the Evaluative, and the Fitting”, Selim Berker https://scholar.harvard.edu/sberker/publications/deontic-evaluative-and-fitting
“Workplace Democracy Implies Economic Democracy”, Nicholas Vrousalis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josp.12275
“The Personite Problem: Should Practical Reason be Tabled?”, Mark Johnston https://www.jstor.org/stable/26631215
I work on Socrates and Plato, so these might be more for the ancient folx than for a general audience, but:
— Rusty Jones & Ravi Sharma 2019, “Xenophon’s Socrates on Harming Enemies” https://philpapers.org/rec/JONXSO
— Emily A. Austin 2020, “Socrates on Why We Should Not Practice Philosophy” https://philpapers.org/rec/AUSSOW
— Rachana Kamtekar 2020, “Platonic Pity, or Why Compassion Is Not a Platonic Virtue” https://philpapers.org/rec/KAMPPO-2
Bonus track: Francesca Alesse’s talk for the International Society for Socratic Studies, “Socrates’ double notion of nomos in Plato’s Crito”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUug0327wrs
At times like these, I wish I kept track of the x best papers I read in a year. Maybe I’ll start doing so…
Anyway, three that leap to mind:
‘Transparency as morally and politically corrupting’ in Asian Journal of Philosophy by Jimmy Alfonso Licon. Link: https://philpapers.org/rec/LICTAM
Don’t make up tap the sign!
*us
Yes
any suggestions for very good recent papers in the philosophy of AI? thanks!
Here’s some of my most recent favourites that approach AI from a Philosophy of Science perspective.
1. Catherine Stinson: “From implausible artificial neurons to idealized cognitive models: Rebooting philosophy of artificial intelligence” (2020, Philosophy of Science).
This paper and Stinson’s earlier “Explanation and Connectionist Models” ask how artificial neural networks can provide models for biological neural networks. I suspect that this question has received little engagement because early AI pioneers took themselves to be building actual minds and philosophers of mind largely took on that assumption. However, (I think) Stinson shows that we can better understand contemporary AI if we take the idea of AI as science seriously and apply tools and theories from Philosophy of Science about how models work to it.
2. Adrian Erasmus, Tyler D. P. Brunet & Eyal Fisher: “What is Interpretability?” (2021, Philosophy and Technology).
Continuing the theme, Erasmus et al. apply ideas from the Philosophy of Science to the idea of Explainable AI and show that the supposed trade off between explainability and accuracy (or computing power) comes from a misunderstanding of what scientific explanation is. Instead, they argue that what we want out of an AI system is interpretability, not explainability – and if I’m interpreting them correctly, that result means that we should be focusing more on how to design interpretations that can meet our needs instead of thinking about how to design AI systems differently so that they are ‘explainable.’
3. Cameron Buckner: Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behaviour (2023, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science).
I wish everyone who wants to argue that contemporary AI systems fail to meet standards of thinking/rationality/etc. set by humans would read this article first. Buckner argues that many of these types of objections come from an overly flattering understanding of our own cognitive capacities and once we have a more accurate picture of ourselves, we can see that these objections aren’t nearly as strong as they initially look. As someone who works in the Philosophy of Animal Minds, I am very familiar with these types of attitudes and not terribly surprised to see them pop up in other areas of comparative psychology. Even if one remains unconvinced, I think this paper significantly helps move the debate forward.
4. Gabbrielle M. Johnson: Are Algorithms Value-Free? (2023, Journal of Moral Philosophy).
I know everyone else is only doing three articles, but I have to sneak one more in here. Johnson applies tools from Feminist Philosophy of Science to contemporary AI systems, arguing that even in principle, algorithms cannot be free of social/political/ethical values. Once again, this is a really nice paper for reframing a contemporary debate about AI. Since algorithms cannot be value free, the response to racist/sexist/etc. AI cannot be projects that aim to rid AI systems of values altogether.
Thank you for these suggestions!
Timothy Luke Williamson’s “A risky challenge for intransitive preferences” impressed me when I read it over the summer.
https://philpapers.org/rec/WILARC-6
I thought it was by the “famous” Timothy Williamson before doing some research.
Liao, S. Y., & Huebner, B. (2021). Oppressive things. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103(1), 92-113.
Absolutely loved this one. I will be adding it to an ethics of data science class in the spring.
I really like Clayton Littlejohn and Julien Dutant’s “Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance”. It is in a new volume on defeat in epistemology edited by Mona Simion and Jessica Brown, but I also included a link to the Phil papers page for it where you can access a copy.
https://philarchive.org/rec/LITDAI-3#:~:text=We%20propose%20that%20defeaters%20are,is%20not%20rational%20to%20believe.
This is really cool! I’m especially interested in the article on Aristotle on megalopsychia. In fact, that whole book looks really interesting. But that brings me to another point: Honestly, I find books generally more interesting and useful than articles. Could you run a comparable post on books sometime soon?
“The Deontic, the Evaluative, and the Fitting” by Selim Berker is great and very teachable.
“Exceeding Expectations: Stochastic Dominance as a General Decision Theory” by Christian Tarsney (https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10895) His main result is maybe one of the most important contributions to normative decision theory in at least a decade.
“Frege’s puzzle and the ex ante Pareto principle” by Anna Mahtani (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01524-w)
“Infinite Prospects” by Jeff Russell & Yoaav Isaacs (https://philpapers.org/rec/RUSINP-2)
I just came across an article on the Kripke-Frege debate about reference, and I find it really intriguing. Not sure if many have seen it. The article suggests that the two sides are essentially talking past each other because they are addressing different phenomena.
Shamoradi, A. Referring with or without individuating the referent. Phil Quarterly.
https://philpapers.org/rec/SHARWO-4
I like its sassy abstract!
And the first part of the conclusion.