Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief, desire and other propositional attitudes; they are what we agree and disagree about in conversation, and they are what is communicated in successful discourse. By philosophical tradition, propositions have their truth values eternally; that is, they always include a reference to a time as a component, and if true, they are always true. The proposition expressed in English by the sentence It is raining in Malta is more completely expressed by something like It is raining in Malta at noon local time on May 4, 2013. This standard view is called eternalism. In her new book Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard, associate professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, calls this traditional view into question. Brogaard defends temporalism, the claim that some propositions do not have their truth values eternally – they lack a time-stamp. She argues instead that eternalists cannot adequately explain how we retain beliefs over time, how we modify beliefs, and how we agree and disagree over the span of an ordinary conversation, and she presents a new argument for temporalism from the phenomenology of conscious mental states. Her lucid and comprehensive discussion is a milestone in debates about our experience of time as expressed in natural language.

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.” According to this maxim, the meaning of a concept or a proposition is ultimately to be defined in terms of the “sensible” and “practical” effects it would produce in the course of experimental action. That is, of course, a crude articulation. But, according to Peirce, the view of meaning that the maxim articulates has vast philosophical implications. Peirce’s pragmatism is at once anti-skeptical, fallibilist, verificationist, inferentialist, and realist. Indeed, that looks like a motley crowd of philosophical commitments. How might they be made to hang together? In his new book, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), Christopher Hookway explores the complexities of Peirce’s philosophy. With chapters devoted to topics ranging from Peirce’s fallibilism, his philosophy of language, his views on mathematics, his rejection of psychologism, and his theory of abduction, Hookway presents Peircean pragmatism as a formidable and strikingly contemporary philosophy. Hookway’s book will be of great interest to anyone interested in pragmatism and the history of 20th-century philosophy, but it also has much to offer to those working on current debates in fields like epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic.

In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: The Sudbury Valley School. (BTW: Peter has some very thoughtful things to say about the way standard schools actually promote bullying and are powerless to prevent it or remedy it once it’s happened. Listen in.)

When confronted with a law that they find morally unconscionable, citizens sometimes engage in civil disobedience – they publicly break the law with a view to communicating their judgment that it is unjust. Citizens in similar situations sometimes take a different stance – they engage in conscientious objection, they quietly disobey, seeking only to keep their own conscience clear. A common view of these matters has it that the conscientious objector is deserving of special respect, and even accommodation, whereas the civil disobedient engages in a politically risky and morally questionable practice. In her new book, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012) Kimberley Brownlee reverses this picture. She contends that properly-conducted civil disobedience is more deserving of accommodation and respect than conscientious objection. Her case turns on a detailed and subtle analysis of the very concepts of conviction and conscience.

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life? When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics. In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”.

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Hussain is a new Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Michigan and Phillip Howard is Professor of Communication, Information, and International Studies at the University of Washington. Through extensive data collection and fieldwork, the authors bring a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach to their timely subject. They argue that digital activism typically travels through six steps of protest mobilization starting with capacity building and ends with post-protest information war. This is the third book from the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series featured on the podcast. As with the previous, Political Scientists can learn a lot from the disciplinary perspective brought to the subject of activism from those in Communications.

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the economy in the near term more than any court case ever had. The substance of the case, and its lasting legal implications, are the subject of Andrew Koppelman’s The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform (Oxford University Press, 2012). The plaintiffs in the “Obamacare” case, NFIB v. Sebelius, had political and legal goals. Politically, they failed, because Justice Roberts was not willing to undo the huge Congressional effort to reform the country’s health-insurance system. But legally, in terms of doctrine, the litigation was a smashing success, altering principles that reach back hundreds of years. Andrew Koppelman has written a superb layman’s guide to what was at stake, legally, in last year’s case — and what the plaintiffs accomplished. They persuaded five justices of the Supreme Court to call into question both of the Court’s most economically significant previous decisions, one from the early days of the Republic, and one from the New Deal. In 1819, the Court agreed unanimously that the federal government could solve national problems: “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adopted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” (James Marshall) In 1935, the vote on a similar question was five to four: “Although activities may be intrastate in character when separately considered, if they have such a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions, Congress cannot be denied the power to exercise that control.” (Charles Evan Hughes) But the dissent in 1935 took a very different view, one that resonates with the conservative voices of 2012: “The right to contract is fundamental, and includes the privilege of selecting those with whom one is willing to assume contractual relations.” (James McReynolds) In 2012, the Court is now split 4-5, in the other direction, on both of these topics. Prof. Koppelman shows that the “necessary & proper” clause, held to trump states’ rights by Justice Marshall, is hollowed out by Justice Roberts’ opinion. And Justice McReynolds’ “right to contract,” made infamous by the Lochner court, has returned in ghostly form, as a new individual right not to contract with insurance companies. In economic matters, the tide of constitutional law is shifting. The power of the Tough Luck constitutional doctrine was not exercised because of Justice Roberts’ forbearance in preserving the Affordable Care Act on other grounds. But with the help of Prof. Koppelman’s lucid and persuasive book, any reader can now fully grasp the legal significance of this line of thinking. Its practical implications, meanwhile, are becoming visible in the context of Medicaid, because a secondary holding in the case empowered governors to refuse new federal money for health care for the working poor.

Eric Hayot‘s new book is a bold, ambitious, and inspiring call for revising the way we think about, practice, and teach literary history. Pt. I of On Literary Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2012) offers a critical evaluation of the notion of “worlds” in literary studies and beyond, offering a language for describing and comparing individual aesthetic works and their modes of worldedness. Pt. II proposes a way of thinking about the history of modern literature and categorizing its modes that makes the study of the non-West not just relevant, but absolutely necessary. At the same time it both contextualizes the history of ideas of the world in early modernity, and asks us to re-think our notions of what “context” is and how we access it. Pt. III of the book takes us into the institutional contexts of literary studies, showing how some basic assumptions about how to periodize literature dominate and constrict the discipline, A final set of appendixes in Pt. IV of the book offer myriad extensions of and ways forward from the project outlined in the previous chapters. The insights here are relevant and useful for scholars working in a wide range of disciplines, and as a historian I found Eric’s insights on how we might innovate our characterizations of textual worlds and temporal modes particularly enlightening. In the course of our conversation, we also talked about how these ideas have transformed Eric’s teaching. For his syllabus on “Comparative Cosmologies,” see this link. Eric Hayot is a contributor to Public Books.

Pragmatism is American’s home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood. This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest proponents: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although it is agreed that they are the founders of Pragmatism, they also held opposing views about meaning, truth, reality, and value. A further complication emerges in that it is widely believed that Pragmatism was purged from the philosophical mainstream and rendered dormant sometime around 1950, and then recovered only in the 1980s by Richard Rorty. In her new book, The American Pragmatists (Oxford University Press, 2013), Cheryl Misak presents a nuanced analysis of the origins, development, and prospects of Pragmatism. She shows that Pragmatism has always come in a variety of flavors, ranging from the highly objectivist views of Peirce and C. I. Lewis to the more subjectivist commitments of James and Richard Rorty. More importantly, Misak demonstrates that Pragmatism has been a constantly evolving philosophical movement that has consistently shaped the landscape of English-language philosophy. On Misak’s account, Pragmatism is the philosophical thread that runs through the work of the most influential philosophers of the past century. Her book will be of interest to anyone with interest in Pragmatism or twentieth-century philosophy.

Sarah Reckhow is the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics (Oxford University Press 2013). Reckhow is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her book probes significant questions about the role of philanthropic foundations in education reform. Through in-depth case studies of New York City and Los Angeles, Reckhow demonstrates how a particular view of school reform has been funded by major foundations such as Gates and Eli Broad. Emphasizing new types of schools, particularly charter schools, and reforms focused around a business-oriented view of school management, foundations have reshaped education in these two cities. Yet differences in governance that exist between the two cities also have resulted in a different role for funders and funding. Reckhow weaves together this story with novel data collection and excellent interviews. The book should be read by scholars in public policy, education, and nonprofit studies.

Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more akin in appearance to the records in my parents’ classical record collection. The back stories and analyses of the concert, the marketing of the recording 12 years later in 1950, and the subsequent canonization of the concert and recording is the story Catherine Tackley tells in her new book for the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz Series, Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2011) Tackley is an extremely busy and talented woman. An academic, musician, writer, teacher, and performer, she adores both the study of and playing jazz. She played Goodman’s songs herself with her big band Dr. Jazz and the Cheshire cats “in a room full of the world’s leading jazz scholars.” Now that’s academic courage! Benny Goodman, billed the “King of Swing,” was uneasy about the longevity of the label; a perfectionist and an artful player of both jazz and classical music, he feared that he’d be typecast. His Carnegie Hall concert was “sold” by promoters at the time as an important event in the history of the evolution of jazz in general and swing in particular. Nonetheless, Tackley recounts how Carnegie Hall had been the site of both classical and popular music, with “crossover” antecedents to “jazz” concerts going back as far as 1912 when an integrated audience attended the Clef Club orchestra consisting of all black musicians who “played a program of traditional spirituals and compositions by black composers.” And there were others, including Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and W.C. Handy featuring Fats Waller, all of whom played at Carnegie Hall before Goodman. Goodman and his band were already well known to the public due to his many live, nationally broadcast radio programs. Tackley uses a musician’s and historian’s approach in analyzing the subtle differences in the arrangements and performances on the January 16, 1938 program. She also tells interesting anecdotes about drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, vibe-player Lionel Hampton, pianist Jess Stacey and many others. Members of Duke Ellington’s and Count Basie’s bands also participated in the jam session that night, too. Ironically, for the musicians who played that evening, it might have been just another working night. After the concert many of the musicians went to the Savoy Ballroom to hear a battle of two other famous bands –Count Basie and Billie Holiday dueling it out with Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald! Finally, the author tells the story of the concert’s own creation myth when 12 years later, in 1950, the acetates from the concert were “found” and subsequently marketed by Columbia Records. Goodman, the critics, and the producers at Columbia thought the release might revive swing. Jazz and Goodman had long moved on to other forms, but the concert on January 16, 1938 became part of jazz history nonetheless. Tackley’s story of the concert, the individual song performances, the critical and audience responses, and the later marketing of the recording gives the reader a fascinating glimpse at how the music that night became part of jazz’s and America’s cultural legacy. On a personal note, my wonderful father-in-law, who passed away in February, 2013, was a WWII veteran who adored big bands and the music of Benny Goodman.

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism.

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such ‘cyclical’ changes. The book is a catalogue of examples of linguistic history repeating itself, with over a thousand example sentences drawn from nearly 300 different language varieties, and ranging over negation, tense, case, object agreement and beyond. Beyond this descriptive role, however, the book is also an attempt to understand the processes that we see within a Minimalist syntactic framework, in which economy on the part of the language acquirer is crucial for language change and semantic features are continually reanalysed as syntactic before being lost entirely. In this interview, among other things, we discuss the notion of the linguistic cycle, the relationship between historical linguistics and syntactic theory (sometimes strained, but usually mutually beneficial), the polysynthetic languages of the Americas, and whether Old English can be classified as polysynthetic.

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he’s taken on here is to describe the progress made in the psychology of language between its actual foundation – around 1800 – and the point at which it’s widely and erroneously believed to have been founded – around 1951. The story that the book tells is remarkable in many ways: not only for its vast breadth and depth of scholarship, but also for the number of misconceptions that it corrects. Levelt uncovers how many modern theories in psycholinguistics are in fact independent rediscoveries of proposals made in the 19th century, and charts the significant positive contributions made to the science by figures who are often overlooked or even derided now (we discuss a couple of such cases in this interview). He vividly depicts how the rapid march of progress was catastrophically disrupted in the early 20th century, by a combination of political strife and scientific wrong turns, before being restored in the 1950s. In this interview we talk about some of the recurring themes of the book – forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. And we touch upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes.

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution. We now know much more about the mechanics of destruction in the East, about the interaction between center and periphery in planning and carrying out mass killings, and about the interaction between Germans, local inhabitants and Jews. Twenty years later, historians have begun to integrate these new studies into broad reexaminations of the Holocaust. Donald Bloxham has written one of the best of these. His book, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford UP, 2009), is a remarkable attempt to put the Holocaust into the broader context of global history. It’s analytical rather than narrative. Its arguments are careful and always attentive to nuance and complexity. And Bloxham demonstrates a deep understanding of research on the Holocaust and in the broader field of Genocide Studies. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, you will come out of this book having reconsidered what you thought you knew about the Holocaust and about European history in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationwide. Indeed, 40 years ago today, women and men around the country were talking about the decision which they had heard on the news earlier in the day. Some, excited by the Supreme Court decision, were planning to open abortion clinics. Others saw the decision as a terrible mistake and were debating how to organize against the Supreme Court decision. For the past four decades, the fetus has featured prominently in this conflict. But our understanding of the fetus as a historical subject is fairly limited. Prompted in large part by the rising abortion debate, historians, sociologists and medical anthropologists began in the 1990s to study the fetus and the impact which medical technology has had on our view of pregnancy and the fetus. Medical technology, these authors have cautioned, did not merely advance our understanding of the fetus, but also contributed to a view which positioned women and the fetus in opposition to each other, with competing interests and rights. Several scholars have examined the impact which changing notions of pregnancy and the fetus have had on public policy. Sara Dubow‘s Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2010) contributes significantly to our understanding of the ways in which the fetus was constructed – both through medical technology and imagination – and the ways in which the changing meaning of the fetus shaped the lives of pregnant women. Her careful attention to the ways in which medical technology contributed to changes in the social construction of the fetus and influenced the laws governing women’s lives makes this a book not to be missed.

What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Gibbs Hill charts the rise and precipitous fall of Lin’s career in an exploration of the making of the modern intellectual in China. Completing over 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese while not knowing a single foreign language, Lin built a “factory of writing” dependent on the mental labor of 20 assistants trained in a range of foreign languages. Hill examines the texture of some of the translations produced by this network, offering a model for the close reading of translations both as literary sources and as sources of conflict over competing visions of intellectual, political, and national authority. Lin was ultimately caught in the crosshairs of prominent scholars and activists arguing over the relative roles of classical and vernacular language within a national project, but not before using his writing as a space to work out ideas about the roles of race, slavery, filial piety, and ethics in the transforming society of modern China. It’s a fascinating story about what it has meant in the past, and what it might mean in the future, to render ideas across linguistic realms.

The 1970s and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict are quite possibly the two most depressing subjects an academic could study. With shag carpeting, disco, Watergate, malaise defining the former and an internecine and (seemingly) eternal clash characterizing the latter who on earth would want to study those topics in one monograph? Well, Gil Troy is up to that task. The McGill University history professor not only took up this unenviable task, he has penned a remarkable work, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford University Press, 2012). On the surface, Troy details Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s iconic 1975 speech at the United Nations that took issue with that body’s definition of Zionism as racism.  The author’s work, however, is much more than the history of a speech. Troy expertly depicts the history of the contemporary Western left as it pertains to Israel and Zionism while also detailing the work and life of an American original, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. If you are at all interested in contemporary US political history or the modern Middle East–this is a must read.

It’s taken for granted among analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry – ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, in particular – involve a special and characteristic methodology that depends essentially on the use of intuitions as evidence for philosophical positions. A thought experiment is developed in order to elicit intuitive judgments, and these judgments have a special epistemic status. Paradigm cases of this methodology include Gettier cases, in which we judge whether the subject in the scenario has or does not have knowledge, and Putnam’s Twin-Earth cases, in which we judge whether the contents of thought depend on the physical nature of a thinker’s environment. The new experimental philosophy movement also accepts this assumption, as it is premised on rejecting it by conducting real experiments (with non-philosophers as subjects) rather than thought-experiments. In Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Herman Cappelen, professor of philosophy at the Arche Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews, argues that this assumption is simply false as a descriptive claim about the practice of contemporary analytic philosophy. Instead, a detailed look at the thought experiments shows that uses of the term “intuition” or “intuitively” are better interpreted as an unfortunate verbal tic or as a conversational hedge indicating that a claim is just a snap judgment or a bit of pre-theoretic background. What is not true, he claims, is that the judgments have bedrock epistemological status, are considered justified without appeals to experience and without inference, that inclinations to believe these judgments tend to be recalcitrant to further evidence, or that these judgments are based on conceptual competence or have a special phenomenology.

Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity of human syntax might have evolved. In doing so, it addresses the long-running argument between (to generalise) linguists and non-linguists as to how big a deal this is: linguists tend to claim that the relevant capacities are unique to humans, while researchers in other disciplines argue for parallels with other animal behaviours. James Hurford sides with the linguists here, but not without giving careful consideration to the status of birdsong, whalesong, and similar systems. Meanwhile, at the other end of the evolutionary process (so far), interest is growing in accounts of human syntax that are incidentally much more gradualist in nature and which invite potential explanation in evolutionary terms. Moreover, the idea of quantitative limits on human processing are being appealed to, in conflict with the tradition view of ‘infinite’ generative capacity. In the second part of the book, Hurford charts a course through this field in order to characterise the ‘target’ of the evolutionary story. Finally, he turns to the process itself, positing a role for the ‘symbolic niche’ in the rapid co-evolution of culture and individual capacities throughout the span of humans’ existence, and considering how grammaticalisation might be responsible for the earliest, as well as the most recent, innovations in human language. In this interview, we touch on many of these topics, and try to situate this work within the history of linguistics. We consider the implications of new trends in linguistic theory and research practice, and look at how evolutionary claims might be validated – or at least shown to be plausible, in the face of residual scepticism. And we discuss whether and when genome research will inform linguistic analysis.

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in “the East”, Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the “Holocaust.” Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to “Germanize” Poland, but he was by no means a “fanatical” Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbrook investigates just how far Klausa was willing to go, what he found acceptable and what he found (or seemed to find) objectionable. It’s a tricky subject because Klausa himself tried to cover his tracks after the war. He seems to have seen that policies he once found quite sensible were, after the war, not so. Fullbrook does a masterful job of using archival sources to show where Klausa’s memory becomes particularly selective. Though it would be too much to call Fullbrook’s portrait of Klausa “sympathetic,” it is certainly both historically and psychologically nuanced and therefore helps us understand his mentality both during the war and after.

Evolutionary approaches to linguistics have notoriously had a rather chequered history, being associated with vague and unfalsifiable claims about the motivations for the origins of language. It seems as though the subject has only recently come in from the cold, and yet there are already rich traditions of research in several distinct fields that offer relevant insights: insights that are crucial if we consider Dobzhansky’s maxim, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, also to apply to human language. In his two-volume (so far) work, James Hurford brings together many of these disparate strands of research and endeavours to answer the question of how humans, uniquely among extant species, came to have such elaborative, productive, referential language. His work is at once vast and authoritative, stimulating and original, and highly accessible. It serves both to introduce new ideas and to draw out potential connections between familiar ones. It’s critical without being dismissive, and seems to succeed in its goal of being genuinely interdisciplinary. This first interview revisits the 2007 book, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2007), which sets out some ideas as to how both meaning (as a relatively ‘private’ matter) and communication (a ‘public’ one) came to be elaborated in humans. We discuss how meaning can be characterised in a way that is evolutionarily friendly, and the kinds of neural processes that might underlie the shape of propositional thought. We look at the relation that might be argued between visual attention and (pre-)linguistic semantics. And we turn to studies of monkey alarm calls, and ask whether the origins of referential meaning are already exhibited by our distant primate cousins.

If you had to bet your life on learning a language in three months, which language would you choose? Peter Trudgill’s first choice wouldn’t be Faroese or Polish; and in his book, Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity (Oxford University Press, 2011), he suggests that there are good historical reasons for that. In the book, Peter Trudgill argues that human societies at different times and places may produce different kinds of language, and considers the influence of different language contact scenarios on linguistic structure. The book’s main thesis is that, while isolation and long-term co-territorial contact can lead to increased complexity, contact situations involving large numbers of adult L2 learners are likely to lead to increased simplicity – and that as a result the typological spread of the world’s languages today is probably strikingly unrepresentative of the situation throughout nearly all of human history. In this interview we discuss the implications of these ideas for certain long-held views, such as the view that all languages are equally complex, and the view that processes operative in the present should be used to explain the past. We also discuss the role of language acquisition, the urgent need for documentation of endangered languages spoken by societies of intimates, and how Peter’s ideas can be applied at other linguistic levels such as syntax.

Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplinary account of modernism through the figure of the ideograph, or Chinese writing as imagined in the West. The beginning of the book introduces the ways that modernism wove together speculations about Chinese writing and responses to technological media. The following four chapters develop this set of ideas by looking at different conceptions of the ideograph and the uses to which they were put in texts ranging from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Each chapter explores a particular author or authors’ engagement with China (or with an idea thereof) through a specific understanding of what Chinese writing was and how it related to a given technological medium. Bush thus takes us from Ezra Pound and Paul Claudel’s imagistic ideograph and photography, to Victor Segalen’s inscriptive ideograph and phonography, to Walter Benjamin’s mimetic ideograph and cinematography, and finally to Paul Valery’s historical ideograph and telegraphy. Bush’s work is particularly fascinating not just in integrating media theories into the history of thinking of/with China, but also in its attention to the ways that China was central to how modernists refashioned their ideas of time and space. It is a wonderful work that helps scholars of East Asia understand an important period in the history of engagement with one of the central objects of our field. Enjoy!

Anthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through libraries and bookshops. Mandeville (whomever he was – and we talk about this issue in the course of our conversation) offers extended discussions of the “Great Khan” of Cathay and of Prester John’s kingdom in India, peppering his tales with stories of dragons, descriptions of man-eating creatures that were half-hippopotamus and half-human, images of foreign alphabets, and many, many others. Bale’s translation is both fluidly rendered in an easily readable modern English prose, and supported by helpful annotations that situate Mandeville’s stories within a wider historical context, and explain Bale’s choices as a translator in terms of the broad range of printed and manuscript editions of Mandeville’s text. Over the course of our conversation we spoke about some especially memorable moments in the book, as well as Bale’s approach to rendering this fascinating but challenging work. Enjoy!

Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722). It focuses on the history of mathematics in this context, but situates the story of mathematics and Kangxi within a larger framework that extends from the late Ming through the years after Kangxi’s reign, and treating much more than mathematics in the course of the analysis. The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722) (Oxford University Press, 2012) takes us from the beginning of Western learning in China in the late Ming dynasty through the commissioning by Kangxi of a massive compendium that was the largest mathematical work ever printed in imperial China. Along the way, Jami’s work surveys the changing pedagogy of imperial mathematics in late imperial China, the crucial role that materiality and instruments played in the mathematics of this period, the many languages of sciences at the court, and the ways that Kangxi alternately used Jesuit mathematics to undergird his authority over Chinese scholar-officials, and sidelined them in the service of championing the mathematical knowledge of Chinese scholars and Bannermen. It is a rich and powerful account that rewards a wide range of readers. Enjoy!

The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect – bluntly speaking Africa’s high levels of religiosity have contributed substantially to its high levels of HIV infection. Religion and AIDS in Africa (Oxford UP, 2012), however, tells a different story, and one based upon an impressive amount of data. For a start, the story that the authors tell is far more nuanced than this broad-brush representation of how religion has impacted HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. In places it has aggravated infection rates and in others it has led to lower levels, for instance through emphasising sex within marriage and through education. Often the picture depends far more upon the message being put out by particular religious leaders in particular villages than the niceties of any Islamic or Christian doctrine. Jenny Trinitapoli and Alex Weinreb also treat AIDS and HIV in a far more holistic way than simply talking about infection rates. They look at the impact of religion on care for the ill, on the intersection between religion and traditional medicine, and the role that stigma has to play. The result is a very serious book about a very serious subject, packed full of insight, data and analysis. It deserves to be widely read by those interested in how HIV and AIDS have impacted.

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprising to learn that they can be seen to have a striking effect on the development of modernist literature. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Joshua Miller begins by evoking a time when the existence and substance of a distinctly American national language is first being argued, and when Presidents, language mavens and the new breed of linguistics scholars are exchanging opinions in major public fora. Against this background, he reads the work of some of the major American writers of the interwar years as exploring and negotiating the relation between language and cultural identity. In this interview, we talk first about Mencken’s rehabilitation as a public figure through his work on language, and his role in the political debates on the status of American English. We then discuss how the cosmopolitan language backgrounds of Gertrude Stein and John dos Passos variously informed their work, how the relationship between language and African American identity plays out in the works of Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, and how Spanish and indigenous languages shape the writing of Carlos Bulosan and Americo Paredes.

Every person must confront death; the only question is how that person will do it. In our culture (I speak as an American here), we don’t really do a very good job of it. We face death by fighting it by any and every means at our disposal. Why we do this is hard to figure, as the struggle against death is often terribly painful (not to mention costly) and always futile. In his new book In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012), Samuel Morris Brown tells us how Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, told his followers to prepare for and confront death. It didn’t come to him all at once. A certain amountof what would become Mormon dogma was revealed to him; a certain amount was borrowed from other creeds; and a certain amount was Smith’s own invention. The doctrine he evolved was profoundly humane. He rejected the idea that we would meet our maker alone. God gave us families and he would never, ever take them away. In heaven, God would re-unite us with our kin and we would enjoy, effectively, eternal life in the bosom of our loved ones. There was, therefore, nothing to fear in death, for it was but a continuation of life, albeit more perfect for being in the proximity of God. I don’t know if it is easier for Mormons to die than for the rest of us, but I can easily imagine that it is.

Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces the integration of new media into the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and then Barack Obama. Kreiss argues that by focusing on innovation, infrastructure, and organization, scholars can better understand how new media has become central to understanding political campaigns in the US. The book draws on dozens of interviews with most of the largely unknown, but integral members of the campaigns of Dean and Obama. The story Kreiss tells reveals much about the nature of modern political campaigns and how the Internet has shaped the last decade of American politics.

Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the history of extraterritoriality and the treaty port system in nineteenth century societies. Eschewing the kinds of teleological narratives that privilege current nation states, Par Cassel locates late Qing, Tokugawa, and Meiji debates in a deep history of legal pluralism, notions of “foreign” identity, and inter-ethnic relations. Cassel uses an impressive range of press accounts, legal texts, and other sources to unfold the ways that the very different trajectories of extraterritoriality in China and Japan had very different consequences for the two countries. Cassel’s book ranges across some fascinating case studies from the histories of opium, counterfeiting, and the police. In addition to being required reading for anyone working in the history of modern China or Japan, Grounds of Judgment is also of special note to readers interested in the ways that language, dialect, and translation have shaped modern history, legal reform, and international relations. Enjoy!

Do social values belong in the sciences? Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models as well as offering a capsule history of the philosophy of science as a professional discipline. The book is a profoundly transdisciplinary work even as it maintains a very careful focus on the philosophy of science as a discipline. Kourany’s archive includes the work of philosophers of science, feminist theorists, sociologists, historians, and many others, with the reader consistently and sometimes explicitly invited into the dialogue. Kourany suggests a program that emerges from previous and contemporary attempts to create a more socially-engaged philosophy of science, guides us through some major potential challenges to the political approach that she advocates, and provides concrete suggestions for integrating philosophers into the construction of more thoughtful ethical codes for scientific practice. It is an engaging, thoughtful, and teachable text advocating a space of philosophers as public intellectuals, and we had a very enjoyable and spirited conversation about it. Enjoy!  

It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are marked mainly by the publication of his two major books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). The most common account of Rawls’s intellectual trajectory has it that the later Rawls came to regard the project of A Theory of Justice as deeply flawed. That is, Political Liberalism is often read as an attempt to dial back or even renounce the project of A Theory of Justice. In fact, Political Liberalism is commonly taken to represent a drastic lowering of the ambitions for political philosophy as such. In his book, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (Oxford University Press, 2010), Paul Weithman meticulously develops and defends a non-standard account of Rawls’s turn from the view proposed in A Theory of Justice to that of Political Liberalism. According to Weithman, both works are centrally focused on the very same problem, namely, how a stably just society is possible among creatures like us. Weithman argues that Rawls’s “turn” involves not a change of topic, or a lowering of ambition, but a change in how Rawls understood the nature of social stability. If Weithman is correct, the standard understanding of Rawls’s philosophy must change significantly. Perhaps more importantly, if Weithman is right, many of the most common criticisms of Rawls more obviously miss their mark.

When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge. This work was dense, long, and I must confess, wound up mostly unread. So when I came across Dr. Paul Gutjahr‘s Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011), I knew I had to find out why someone would write a biography about this man. It turns out there is much more to Hodge than I imagined. Dr. Gutjahr sets Charles Hodge in context and takes us through all of his 80 years letting us see into his family, friendships and battles. He concludes showing how Hodge is still influencing Christianity in America today.

David Karpf is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (Oxford University Press 2012) and an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. His book is timely, well-researched, and insightful. He explores the adoption of Internet technologies by advocacy groups in the early 2000s, specifically MoveOn, DailyKos, and Democracy for America. Karpf argues that these technologies are transformative and disruptive, permitting the establishment of whole new types of advocacy group based on low-cost, high-speed virtual mobilization and organizing. Readers from both the academic and professional political world would benefit from reading this book. Its conclusions suggest a radical change in the population of interest groups as we know it.

According to a view familiar to philosophers, reasoning is a process that occurs within an individual mind and is aimed specifically at demonstrating on the basis of statement that we accept the correctness of some other statement. We reason, that is, in order to figure out what to believe or decide what to think. Reasoning in this sense has as its objective its own termination–we reason in order to reach a conclusion; and once a conclusion is reached, reasoning is no longer needed. In his new book, Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012), Professor Anthony Simon Laden challenges this common view. He contends that the standard picture of reasoning is insufficiently attentive to the respects in which reasoning is an activity we engage in together and not only for the purpose of demonstrating the correctness of statements, but in order to structure, shape, change, and construct relations with others. On the “social picture” of reasoning that Laden develops, reasoning is a matter of issuing invitations to others to share an evolving and public space of reasons. In developing this new picture, Laden proposes fully social conceptions of the norms and purposes of reasoning. What emerges is a deeply compelling picture of the richness of rational human interaction.

How do ideologies shape foreign policy? That is question Dr. Mark Haas examines in his new book The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012). The book analyzes how ideologies shape the perceptions and actions of governments, and specifically the impact this has on relations between the US and the Middle East. Dr. Haas examines two key variables, ideological distance and ideological polarity, using case studies on the Syrian-Iranian alliance, Iran’s ideological factions in the past decade, Turkey’s post-cold war foreign policies, and the US-Saudi relationship. The book not only analyzes the ways in which ideologies impact foreign policy, but also tries to provide ways for improving foreign policy decisions in the future by employing strategies that use ideological analysis.

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see? This question informs a long history of debates over scientific realism and the extent to which we trust what contemporary and future scientific theories tell us about unobservable phenomena. Using the history of science as an evidentiary archive, Kyle Stanford explores this set of problems in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback, 2010). He suggests that we reframe the problem as one of “unconceived alternatives.” Put briefly, if we look at the history of scientific inquiry we’ll see that scientists have repeatedly occupied an epistemic position from which they could conceive of only a fraction of the theories that would have been amply supported by existing evidence. Stanford develops this idea and demonstrates its significance via a series of case studies from the early history of theorizing about generation and inheritance, moving from Darwin’s “mad dream” to Galton’s rabbit transfusion experiments and Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm. Over the course of our conversation we talked, among other things, about the ways that a project like this can contribute to efforts to create a broader trans-disciplinary dialogue across the vast terrain of STS. Enjoy!

The basic problem of free will is quite simple to pose: do we ever act freely? One of the traditional “no” answers comes from the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that everything that happens had to happen given the initial conditions of the universe and the laws governing its unfolding since then. A contemporary variant goes something like this: we’re predetermined to do what we do because our minds arise from brain activity and brain activity is just a special kind of physical activity. In A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford, 2012), Helen Steward attempts to undermine the fundamentals of this mechanistic view with an alternative that she calls Agency Incompatibilism. On Steward’s view, the concept of agency is very close to that of animacy, and includes the concept of being able to settle what happens, when and how with one’s body. Since settling matters implies that they are not determined, agency is incompatible with determinism, and since there are agents, determinism must be false. That is, it is not up to physics to tell us whether determinism is true. Moreover, she denies that the causal efficacy nature of agency should be explicated in terms of events going on inside agents. With this subtly argued book, Steward assumes a leading role in a new non-mechanistic movement in the metaphysics of mind and mental causation.

Justice requires that each person gets what he or she deserves. Luck is a matter of good or bad things simply befalling people; hence luck distributes to people things they do not deserve. Justice must then be in the business of morally correcting the impact of luck on individuals’ lives. This is an extremely simplified articulation of a popular–and in certain philosophical circles infamous–conception of justice called luck egalitarianism. As a kind of egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires something to be distributed equally, and various versions of the doctrine disagree about what this is. The luck in luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires that individuals not be advantaged (or disadvantaged) for features of their lives that have simply befallen them as a matter of good (or bad) luck; rather, social advantage (and disadvantage) should be tied to an individual’s choices. This basic principle of luck egalitarianism seems intuitive. The difficulty lies in building a conception of social justice upon it. Three pressing details confronting the luck egalitarian are the site, ground, and scope of egalitarian justice. These correspond, roughly to the following three questions: (1) to what do egalitarian principles of justice apply?; (2) Why does equality matter?; and (3) To whom are egalitarian duties of justice owed? In his new book, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kok-Chor Tan articulates and defends an original conception of luck egalitarianism according to which (1) egalitarian principles of justice apply to social institutions rather than to the whole of social life; (2) equality matters because there is a fundamental moral distinction between luck and choice; and (3) duties of justice are not bounded by state borders, but are owed globally. In developing his view, Tan responds to luck egalitarianism’s critics and launches compelling critiques of its competitors. The book hence provides the reader with both a detailed roadmap of the current debates over egalitarianism and a state-of-the-art formulation of a distinctive egalitarian conception of justice.

Ask any student or aficionado of the Vietnam War (1965-1972) for a top ten list of artifacts “unique” to the war, and chances are the phenomenon of “body counts” as a tool for measuring success in the field will come up. Indeed, the use of casualty metrics, while not the sole means of calculating progress in this unconventional war, was one of the Army’s most heralded – and subsequently, most criticized – assessment tools. Taking its place alongside more esoteric metrics, such as gauging security on the basis of population resettlement, calculating the denial of strategic space by measuring raw acreage of defoliated land, and estimating anticipated casualties on the basis of ordnance tonnage expended on a defined area, body counts became the most visibly broken method employed by the Pentagon during the war. Even now, nearly fifty years after the war began, historians continue to debate the effectiveness of such metrics, and how they did or did not accurately portray the course of the conflict. Gregory A. Daddis’ new book, No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2011), takes direct aim at the questions of how a technologically-advanced army measures its progress and success in an asymmetrical conflict. Recognizing that data collection efforts frequently overwhelmed any effort at proper and judicial analysis, Daddis considers how the quest for reliable metrics of success affected the conduct of operations in the field. No Sure Victory is a critical addition to the historiography of the Vietnam War, and presents a valuable addendum for students and practitioners of unconventional war alike.

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina, the men are “Important Men,” and together they grace the cover of of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collaborative effort of historian Trevor R. Getz and graphic artist Liz Clarke. In 1876 Abina took her former master to court in the British-controlled Gold Coast for having enslaved her. She had already escaped to freedom: she seems to have brought charges simply because she wanted her experience of slavery to be recognized. It wasn’t. Abina lost her case. But in reconstructing Abina’s story in graphic form, Getz and Clarke bring it to present-day readers. And they also bring important questions to the students who are the intended audience of this book: What background information do we need to understand Abina’s story? Whose voices do we hear, and whose don’t we hear? What do historians do when they don’t know all the details of a story? Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and Liz Clarke is a professional artist and graphic designer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Together, they bring a silenced voice back to life, and they do it in an enormously engaging way.

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable. At the same time, marriage is portrayed as necessary for a healthy and flourishing adult life. And we often see the event of a wedding to have a morally transforming power over the individuals who get married. But with only a little bit of reflection, our popular conception of the meaning and significance of marriage begins to look problematic. Is marriage really so different from other kinds of interpersonal relations that it should be accorded such a central place in our popular views about adulthood? Are those who happen to never fall in love and so never get married really doomed to an inferior or morally impoverished kind of life? And when one considers the significant social and legal benefits, rights, and privileges that accrue to individuals in virtue of their being married the standard picture seems all the more objectionable. These thoughts have led some to conclude that marriage should be disestablished as a civic status. In Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), Elizabeth Brake criticizes the popular view of marriage as intrinsically dyadic, heterosexual, and focused on romantic love and sexual exclusivity. She also rejects the idea that marriage is a unique kind of moral relation, one that differs in kind from friendships and other kinds of caring relationships. Brake also challenges the current political and legal significance that currently attaches to marriage. Yet she also rejects marriage disestablishment; employing arguments drawing from John Rawls’s later work, Brake opts instead for a conception of minimal marriage in which marriage is conceived as a relation between two or more people for purposes of mutual care.

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Susan K. Harris‘ latest book, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) targets the religious references in McKinley’s and Twain’s comments, assessing the role of religious rhetoric in the national and international debates over America’s global mission at the turn into the 20th century. She points out that no matter which side Americans took, all assumed that the U.S. was founded in Protestant Christian principles. Harris probes the ramifications of this assumption, drawing on documents ranging from Noah Webster’s 1832 History of the United States through Congressional speeches and newspaper articles, to In His Steps, the 1896 novel that asked “What Would Jesus Do?” Throughout, she offers a provocative reading both of the debates’ religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the U.S. She also moves outside U.S. geopolitical boundaries, reviewing responses to the Americans’ venture into global imperialism among Europeans, Latin Americans, and Filipinos. Harris works through key voices, including Twain, U.S. Senators Albert Beveridge and Benjamin Tillman; Filipino nationalists Emilio Aguinaldo and Apolinario Mabini; Latin American nationalists José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and Rubén Darío; and the voices of Americans who wrote poems, essays, and letters either endorsing or protesting America’s plunge into colonialism. This book matters: in the process of uncovering the past, Harris shows us the roots of current debates over textbooks, Christian nationalism, and U.S. global imaging.

Kevin Whitehead‘s highly readable, informative and entertaining Why Jazz? A Concise Guide (Oxford University Press, 2011) is bookshelf “must have” for anyone who loves jazz – and he does it in a question/answer call and response style that is the perfect format for today’s point and click text and twitter world. It’s a primer for those who want to know more about the fascinating personalities in jazz from Louis Armstrong to Mary Lou Williams to Anthony Braxton (and Miles, Mingus, Monk and Coltrane); it’s a history lesson from New Orleans Dixieland to otherworldly free-jazz. Best of all, Kevin gives the reader a rich trove of musical examples and a wide-ranging discography certain to open new vistas for those who are just digging jazz for the first time as well as aficionados who have been listening for years. Almost a half century ago, historian Will Durant condensed his 11 volumes of a lifetime of research into a small, thin work acknowledging the folly of trying to encompass the complexity of the impossible task before him. Kevin Whitehead has worked a similar miracle in his slim volume Why Jazz? This is a gem of a book that’s got passion and insight and beckons those who dig jazz and don’t know why as well as those who think they “get it” and want to know more.

Chris Mole‘s book, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011) provides a wonderfully elegant answer to a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to pay attention? What is “attention,” and why does it matter to science studies? In addition to offering a beautifully worked-out answer to the question of attention, Mole offers a way to think about how philosophy and science can fruitfully speak to each other in ways that can benefit both fields. Our conversation about the book ranged from considering the non-spooky nature of metaphysics, to the distinction between events and objects, to Mole’s musical metaphor for thinking about cognitive processes. Enjoy!

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it is these that Peter Robb has so magnificently re-worked as Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822 (Oxford University Press, 2011, 2 vols). Richard’s diaries are quite literally a chronicle of the everyday and the ordinary, what might even be called mundane and the petty, in Calcutta in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these diaries Richard talks about his children, his loves, his network of colleagues, helps, acquaintances, what might today be dubbed ‘frenemies’, people, European, Indian, ‘half-caste,’ who exasperated him but without whom it was well nigh impossible to function in a city where everyone needed everyone else to get their work done. Peter Robb’s edited compendium of these diaries is a record of how social networks operated in a very cosmopolitan city, yet one whose inhabitants were always all too aware of their social, religious, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Sometimes the lines between the personal and the professional blurred, and sometimes favors were given and taken from unlikely persons, and people were not always, by modern standards, ethical, yet in the end everyone managed to establish for themselves a position that would guarantee, if not prosperity, survival.

It’s a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn’t be able to do these interviews. In particular, I don’t speak Swedish, and I’m not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on the subject. Fortunately for my purposes, English has reached a level of saturation, and thus Tore Janson is able to explain to us why that is. The History of Languages: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) gives a brief synopsis of some of the major trends in language change over the course of recorded history. Indo-European is discussed, but the scope of the book is much wider, turning to the Bantu and Australian language families, and also to the written traditions of China and Ancient Egypt. Rather than being concerned with the linguistic regularities of change, Prof. Janson’s focus is much more on the circumstantial historical causes of change, and his work is a useful complement to work in historical linguistics – in addition to being a very enjoyable read in its own right. In this interview, we talk about some of the points he raises: the dissimilarity between the languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, the motivations for the emergence of written language and its role as a stabilising influence on society, and the foundations of linguistic identity in the modern nation-state, among others. And we consider the parallel between Latin in England and Arabic in Persia, as examples of how seemingly inevitable linguistic change can unexpectedly falter.