"Newton's Metaphysics of Substance"

New from Oxford University Press: Newton's Metaphysics of Substance: God, Bodies, Minds by Patrick J. Connolly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Newton's Metaphysics of Substance offers a systematic interpretation of Isaac Newton's views on the ontology of substance and related issues of modality, causation, and dependence. Alongside and sometimes in dialogue with his work in mathematics and physics, Newton developed a coherent and unified account of God, material bodies, human minds, and the relations between them. Drawing on a large number of published and unpublished sources, Patrick J. Connolly traces the development of Newton's views, situates them within the wider context of early modern philosophy, and highlights their value and originality.

Newton holds that God is different in kind from created substances. While God has a substantial essence or nature, created substances like bodies and human minds are merely collections of powers. Created substances nonetheless enjoy considerable independence and autonomy. Newton rejects positions like occasionalism which deeply involve God in the immediate production of nature's works. Much of his project, then, involves individuating, defining, and analysing the different powers that join together to account for the phenomena displayed by minds and bodies.

Exploring Newton's understanding of God, bodies, and minds in this way reveals his deep engagement with many of the central philosophical issues considered by his contemporaries. Among other topics, the book canvases Newton's approach to arguments for God's existence, the univocity of being, causation, atomism and infinite divisibility, the architecture of matter, human cognitive faculties, and the mind-body problem. On each of these topics Newton carefully engages the views of his predecessors in the course of developing arguments for his preferred position.

While Newton's work is of continuing interest for philosophy of science, this book shows that his philosophical interests and achievements were much broader. Although he never published a unified treatment of his metaphysical views, it is possible to understand Newton as having constructed a philosophical system. In this sense, he can be usefully situated alongside figures like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Land, Language, and Women"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History by Julie L. Reed.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historians largely understand Native American education through the Indian boarding schools and reservation schools established by the US government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Native Americans taught and learned from one another long before colonization, and while white settlers and institutions powerfully influenced Indigenous educational practices, they never stopped Native peoples from educating one another on their own terms.

In this ambitious and imaginatively conceived book, Julie L. Reed uses Cherokee teaching and learning practices spanning more than four centuries to reframe the way we think about Native American educational history. Reed draws on archaeological evidence from Southeastern US caves, ethnohistorical narratives of Cherokee syllabary development, records from Christian mission schools, Cherokee Nation archives, and family and personal histories to reveal surprising continuity amid powerful change. Centering the role of women as educators across generations in Cherokee matrilineal society, the power of land to anchor learning, and the significance of language in expressing sovereignty, Reed fundamentally rethinks the nature of educational space, the roles played by teachers and learners, and the periodization imposed by US settler colonialism onto the Indigenous experience.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Islands and the Stars"

New from Stanford University Press: The Islands and the Stars: A History of Japan’s Space Programs by Subodhana Wijeyeratne.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is among the six largest national space agencies in the world, along with China's CNSA, US's NASA, and Russia's Roscosmos. JAXA's budget is more than $1 billion USD―bigger than France or Germany individually, and more than that of Italy, India, Canada, and the UK combined. And yet, Japan's significant contributions have largely been absent in the history of space exploration, and space exploration largely absent in the history of technology in Japan. The Islands and the Stars corrects this conspicuous oversight. Through meticulous archival research in Japanese and anglophone archives, Subodhana Wijeyeratne examines the history of Japan's space exploration efforts over nearly a century.

Wijeyeratne traces the evolution of Japan's space program from its early origins in the 1920s, through the postwar period of rapid technological innovation, to the consolidation of its various institutional elements into JAXA in 2003. He situates Japan's space programs within the broader history of the country's postwar recovery, economic growth, and cultural identity, while also considering their place within global trends in space exploration. Through this narrative, Wijeyeratne not only illuminates Japan's centrality to the global history of science and technology, but also offers insights into the future of global space exploration, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and perspectives in the quest to understand our place in the cosmos.

Visit Subodhana Wijeyeratne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vital Lives"

New from Oxford University Press: Vital Lives: Social Responsibility and the Battle Against Chronic Disease by Carl F. Cranor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Chronic diseases are a major menace to the goal of living healthier, longer, and more vital lives. In the 20th century a sustained, and comprehensive scientific effort by public health officials, physicians, researchers, and legislators, was made to reduce the threat of infectious diseases. Chronic afflictions subsequently became the dominant health burden. All of us are vulnerable to various dysfunctions-cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes and cirrhosis- that decrease the vitality of life and longevity, accelerate aging, and increase pain and misery. Sixty percent of Americans are afflicted by at least one of them. This rises to 78% when cohorts reach 55, and as high as 85% after 65. These illnesses cost more than three trillion dollars annually and constitute 6 of the 10 leading causes of US deaths from disease.

Numerous factors complicate our understanding of, and efforts to reduce, these dysfunctions: lifestyle and personal habits, involuntary and environmental toxic exposures, and inferior social circumstances and institutions-poor and marginal neighborhoods, limited and inadequate healthcare, poorly protected and dangerous workplaces. To fully understand these maladies Carl F. Cranor casts a wide interdisciplinary net, drawing from the research of physicians, epidemiologists, sociologists and philosophers to identify their nature, development, extent, and causal contributions- ultimately recommending a division of responsibilities between individual and broader socially responsible efforts to justly support vital lives. Individuals can influence chronic afflictions, but these actions alone are insufficient. Cranor argues that, while individuals can influence chronic afflictions, they must be comprehensively and responsibly supported by improved social conditions, healthcare and health-protection institutions, all of which require enhanced social responsibility by public officials and legislators.

The Page 99 Test: Legally Poisoned.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On the Altar"

New from Princeton University Press: On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular by Jonathan Sheehan.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Christianity both abolished and absorbed sacrifice

From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ’s death on the cross was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, eclipsing the temple sacrifices of Judaism and paganism. And yet at the center of the lived faith was the repetition of sacrifice: the offering of Christ’s body, the sacrifices of ancient patriarchs, and the sacrifices of martyrs woven through liturgy, theology, and popular devotion.

But this double life collapsed in the Reformation. Quarreling heirs to Christian truth discovered that the sacrifices they once called Christian might be nothing of the sort. To build their new faiths—to discover the truth of Christian sacrifice—they turned to the past, learning from Christianity as it was how Christianity ought to be.

In On the Altar, Jonathan Sheehan offers a new account of sacrifice both sacred and secular. His story is in part a history of the Christian imagination across the centuries of the Reformation, when new martyrs and holy warriors fought for the truth of their sacrifices, when the empire of New World sacrifice was recruited to settle Christian conflicts, and when the sacrifices of the ancient Hebrews were weaponized for orthodoxy. But it is a history of the secular imagination as well, as the vast archive of Christian sacrifice was dispersed and applied to things that humans make, their religions, politics, and societies. With On the Altar, Sheehan reveals a new history of both Christianity and the secular world in which we still live.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Brothel and Beyond"

New from Penn State University Press: The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice by Saundra Weddle.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Brothel and Beyond deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city.

From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps and photographs of key sites, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces.

By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rewriting Rights"

New from Oxford University Press: Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context by Renée Jørgensen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Promising, consenting, and even attacking someone are ways to 'rewrite' our rights, permitting others to treat us in ways that would otherwise have violated the duties they owe us. When unsure whether such a change has been made, we face 'normative opacity'. Incorrect guesses cause injurious mistakes, thus requiring an urgent assessment of the responsibility we have to each other in responding to normative opacity. Rewriting Rights highlights the social dimension of this question: at scale, any bias in the error tendencies of the rules we use yields uneven distributions of actual harm. At the individual level this problem is intractable: we can't do better than responsibly following our best evidence, even when this predictably leads us to make mistakes that injure marginalised groups-in particular women and Black men-at disproportionate rates. Analogizing the problem to safe driving, Jørgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.

The book's main project is to construct and defend a standard for navigating uncertainty about rights-changes that is not overly demanding but avoids compounding extant gender and racial bias. It offers a characterization that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. Jørgensen argues that when carefully constrained, social norms can significantly resolve normative opacity-and urges that it is only by recognizing this that we can reform the unjust norms that shape our conception of which mistakes are reasonable.

Visit Renée Jørgensen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Disobedience as Protest"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Property Disobedience as Protest: Rethinking Political Nonviolence by William E. Scheuerman.

About the book, from the publisher:

William E. Scheuerman’s book explores when, if ever, politically motivated property harms are justifiable

In 2020, Black Lives Matter activists toppled Confederate monuments and occasionally vandalized police vehicles and stations. Climate activists have damaged natural gas pipelines and famous artworks. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy students targeted businesses sympathetic to the mainland government. On January 6, 2021, far-right groups at the US Capitol mistreated public and private property as part of their efforts to disrupt finalizing election results. Property damage constitutes an increasingly commonplace feature of global political protest. How then to interpret and evaluate its proliferation? The media regularly describes such acts as “violent,” as do most scholars. However, William E. Scheuerman’s book pushes back against conflating politically motivated violations of property rights with violence. Political violence has no place in democratic politics. Yet indiscriminately grouping property damage together with acts destructive of and harmful to persons is conceptually confusing and politically misleading. After all, Americans celebrate the Boston Tea Party. So why do most of us now categorically condemn many seemingly parallel acts?

Scheuerman tackles challenging and politically timely questions. When, if ever, are politically motivated property harms justifiable? What standards should we expect of those pursuing them to meet, under democratic conditions? How are those standards undermined by the rise of authoritarian populism around the world? Focusing on identifiably nonviolent varieties of what Scheuerman calls property disobedience, his book explores a variety of real-life examples, both past and present, to understand how and why such acts may be politically justifiable―or should instead be viewed as beyond the pale.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reimagining Aid"

New from Stanford University Press: Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia by Mary-Collier Wilks.

About the book, from the publisher:

It was long assumed that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the answers for development and national progress. Today, in the face of growing inequality and global power imbalances, this post–Cold War narrative has faltered. New players on the international scene, many from South and East Asia, have emerged to vie for influence and offer new models of development. Despite these recent changes, however, prominent international aid organizations still work under the assumption there are one-size-fits-all best practices. In Reimagining Aid, Wilks takes readers to Cambodia, a country at the heart of this transformation. Through a vivid, multi-sited ethnography, the book investigates the intricate interplay between aid donors from Japan and the United States, their competing priorities, and their impact on women's health initiatives in Cambodia. Cambodian development actors emerge not just as recipients of aid, but as key architects in redefining national advancement in hybrid, regional terms that juxtapose "Asia" to the "West." This book is a clarion call for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to rethink what development means in a multipolar world. A must-read for anyone invested in Southeast Asia's role in global affairs and evolving definitions of gender in development, Reimagining Aid is a powerful reminder that the next chapter of global advancement is being written in unexpected places.

Visit Mary-Collier Wilks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Winning It Back"

New from Cornell University Press: Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics by David A. Crockett.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Winning It Back, David A. Crockett explores why presidents who promise to set things aright―to "restore"―so often usher in the opposite.

Since the earliest days of the United States, presidencies have seemingly unfolded in a cyclical manner, with features from prior eras recurring in later ones. Building on the idea of "political time"―that presidential terms fall within particular regime cycles―Crockett shows that presidents often fall into one of two roles: opposition presidents and restoration presidents. Opposition presidents belong to the political party not representing the dominant governing philosophy of a specific political era―for example, Republican presidents during the New Deal era (e.g., Eisenhower, Nixon) and Democratic presidents during the Reagan era (e.g., Clinton, Obama). Restoration presidents, conversely, belong to the dominant party, come to power after opposition presidents and, as such, face the task of "restoring" the dominant party's governing agenda.

But that return is rarely smooth. Restoration presidents―like Kennedy after Eisenhower, or George W. Bush after Clinton―inherit both the hope of a comeback and the burden of pent-up expectations. Crockett argues that these leaders often overreach in their urgency to restore what was, inadvertently setting the stage for backlash and, eventually, the unraveling of their own political order.

With sharp historical analysis and a wide-angle view of presidential politics from Jackson to today, Winning It Back offers timely insights on leadership legacies and the risks of nostalgia―and a clarion call for what (and who) may come next.

--Marshal Zeringue