New Book

Eight books, one question: the philosophy that defined 2026 so far

Six of the year's most consequential philosophy books are about artificial intelligence. The two that are not — a history of the concept and a history of prediction — are the reason the other six are worth reading. A survey of the year to September.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Yuk Hui, Carissa Véliz

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.

The Al-Rodhan Prize 2026 longlist: the question philosophy asks has changed

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has announced the 2026 longlist for its £20,000 interdisciplinary philosophy prize. Six books, drawn from six separate disciplines. Yet all of them ask a single question, and that question gives away philosophy's real agenda in 2026: what exactly is a human being?

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.

Burge answers Descartes, and it takes him 688 pages

The philosopher who established that the content of our thoughts is not fixed inside our heads published a new book in August. Burge answers the two scepticisms that have run since Descartes, and both answers come from one place: understanding is a far greater achievement than we suppose.

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.