New Books

Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics Lectures and the Question of What Understanding Is

A new edition of the courses Friedrich Schleiermacher gave in 1809-10 and 1819 returns to the moment when interpretation stopped being a craft with local rules and became a question about the mind — a question that machine reading has now made awkward again.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Leiter opens a realist front: 'there is no such thing as real normativity'

The blogger who announced Alexy's death stands at the opposite pole from him in legal philosophy. Brian Leiter's new collection from Oxford argues that what explains a judge's decisions is not reasons but psychology, ideology and social circumstance. A review in NDPR points to a tension.

Forty years on reference: Devitt draws up the account in Reference and Beyond

Michael Devitt's collection from Oxford University Press takes stock of one of the longest-running arguments in the philosophy of language: what does a name refer to? The review in NDPR calls it the most consistent defence yet written from within the causal tradition.

The book he forbade, published thirty-six years on: Foucault's fourth volume

Foucault's will was unambiguous: no posthumous publication. But the manuscript had been delivered to his publisher in 1982. Confessions of the Flesh, which appeared in 2018, deals not with the modern period readers expected but with the early Church Fathers — and looks there for the origin of the modern subject's obligation to speak about itself.

What is a concept? A twenty-two-chapter inquiry from Cambridge

'Concept' is among the words philosophy uses most and questions least. A new Cambridge collection follows its history from ancient Greece to Chinese and Indian thought, from Islamic philosophy to Kant and on to conceptual engineering. The result is less a history of philosophy than philosophy inspecting its own instrument.

The philosophy books of 2026 in three words: consciousness, prophecy, artificial state

Look at the year's leading books together and a pattern emerges. Pollan maps consciousness; Véliz argues that prediction is an instrument of power rather than of knowledge; and Lepore puts a name to whatever is displacing the nation-state: the Artificial State.

The welfare of the machine: a new Cambridge book asks the question early

Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street's book in the Cambridge Elements series sets out, in orderly fashion, a question with no answer yet: can an artificial intelligence system have welfare, and if it can, what follows for us? One author works at Google — a detail that explains where the book stands.

A philosopher's notebook of grief: Amy Olberding's chickens

Amy Olberding, who works on Confucian ethics, meant to write a cool-headed book about grief when she took over the family farm in the Ozarks. She could not manage it. The book that emerged is also about the class mask that academic philosophy quietly demands — and the title comes from that mask.

Thinking through fear: Nistor's philosophy of the horror film

Iulia Nistor's new book treats horror films not as a genre to be catalogued but as a means of philosophical thought. Her question is why anyone should choose to watch the thing that frightens him. The answer runs from Aristotle's catharsis to Kant's sublime and Kristeva's abject.