All posts tagged: editor: richard b. gibson

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Why Plato Matters Now

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Why Plato Matters Now

Published by Jenni Sidey

Angie Hobbs is Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Sheffield. A leading scholar of ancient philosophy and its contemporary relevance, she is the author of Plato and the Hero and, most recently, Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025). Alongside her academic work, she engages widely with public and policy audiences—contributing frequently to radio and television, including a record 27 appearances on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, and speaking at venues ranging from the World Economic Forum to the U.K. Parliament. In this interview, Hobbs discusses how Plato’s dialogues illuminate urgent contemporary questions about democracy, flourishing, education, love, and resilience—and why Plato’s voice remains indispensable today. What is your work about? In each chapter of Why Plato Matters Now, I take a topic of pressing contemporary relevance and explore how Plato’s arguments, concepts, and methodology can illuminate it: dialogue and the dialogue form; the nature of a flourishing life; democracy, demagoguery, and tyranny; how communities are built and destroyed; heroism and celebrity and what money can and cannot …

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Aesthetics and Video Games

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Aesthetics and Video Games

Published by Jenni Sidey

Christopher Bartel is Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Practical and Public Ethics Research Group at Charles Sturt University. His work lies at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, with a particular focus on video games, music, and technology. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury, 2020) and, most recently, Aesthetics and Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2025). In this interview, Bartel discusses what makes video games aesthetically valuable, introduces his concept of “dollhouse play,” and reflects on how interactive digital worlds create new forms of imaginative freeplay that challenge traditional philosophical frameworks. What is your work about? My book, Aesthetics and Video Games, is about what makes video games aesthetically enjoyable. My aim was to provide a philosophical framework for thinking about all the various ways that players find aesthetic value in games. The aesthetics of video games has been the subject of scrutiny for quite a while, but largely among scholars working in other fields—like literature, film studies, media …

Why is Health Good for You?

Why is Health Good for You?

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Brush your teeth,” a mother says to her son. She’s exhausted. She spent a long day organizing a series of speaking events hosted by her department, Bioethics, at the NIH. A tough year at the NIH followed several tough years of fierce public and academic debate over the legitimacy of public health efforts and the value of scientific medicine. He needs to go to bed. First, he needs to brush his teeth. What she doesn’t need is— “Why?” he asks. “Because it’s good for you,” she replies, reflexively. “Why?” he asks, predictably. “Because it’ll keep your teeth healthy.” “So?” “Don’t you want healthy teeth?” He shrugs. This time, she pauses. She almost repeated her first reply—but that would be circular. She began mentally collecting instrumental benefits of dental health—but that won’t move him. “Just brush your teeth, son.” Later, lying in bed, her thoughts turn back to her son’s shrug. It seemed in a way representative of the zeitgeist that has made her job difficult these past years: reluctance to accept “because it’s good for …

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics: A Cinematic Exploration

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics: A Cinematic Exploration

Published by Jenni Sidey

Patrick D. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central State University and a recipient of a 2025 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) HBCU Faculty Grant. He is the author of Cypherpunk Ethics: A Radical Ethics for the Digital Age (2022) and a contributor to The Rhetoric of Fascism (2022). His research focuses on the history of Africana philosophy, applied ethics, and digital technologies. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, he discusses his newest work, Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics: A Cinematic Exploration (2026), which develops an anticolonial methodology for political philosophy and fleshes it out using Hollywood cinema. What is your work about? And why did you feel the need to write it? Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics draws upon Africana anticolonial philosophy—especially the work of Frantz Fanon and two of his most influential interpreters, Eldridge Cleaver and Sylvia Wynter—to develop a basic analytical model for doing anticolonial political theory. I wanted to show that there is something distinctive, something special, to be found in this tradition of thought that has not been fully …

Normothermic Regional Perfusion, the Dead Donor Rule, and the Metaphysics of Causation

Normothermic Regional Perfusion, the Dead Donor Rule, and the Metaphysics of Causation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Over the last decade, a novel method of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) known as normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) has come into widespread use in various European countries. Although DCD is well established in the U.S., NRP has generated significant controversy, and the American College of Physicians (ACP) has issued a statement recommending a freeze on its implementation until outstanding ethical concerns are more thoroughly resolved. At the center of the controversy is the contention that NRP kills the donor. In its “controlled” form (cDCD), donation after circulatory death follows a request by a patient with a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR) or a surrogate decision-maker for such a patient to withdraw life-sustaining treatments (LSTs) due to a poor prognosis. Once LSTs are withdrawn and the patient sustains cardiac arrest, physicians wait for five minutes before declaring the patient dead based on circulatory criteria. In “standard” cDCD, surgeons rapidly retrieve organs and place them in cold storage. Unfortunately, however, organs tend to suffer damage during the five-minute “hands-off period” following cardiac arrest when they are deprived …

Recently Published Book Spotlight: The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics, and Philosophy

Recently Published Book Spotlight: The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics, and Philosophy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Manuel Almagro is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Valencia. He is the author of The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics and Philosophy, published with Routledge and shortlisted for the Nayef-Al Rodhan Book Prize 2025. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Manuel discusses why prevailing accounts of affective polarization misunderstand the phenomenon, how narratives shape political life, and why his broader philosophical commitments guide both his research and his everyday experience. What is your work about? My book is an attempt to pin down a phenomenon that defines our time, one most of us are very familiar with but which is hard to understand. Since around 2012, this phenomenon has been termed “affective polarization,” after Shanto Iyengar and other political scientists observed an interesting pattern in how citizens responded to certain survey questions. This pattern has become both the definition of the phenomenon and the basis for a diagnosis of the current political situation. And both of these, I argue in the book, are mistaken and problematic. We need to change …

Environmental Bioethics and the Problem of Interdependence

Environmental Bioethics and the Problem of Interdependence

Published by Jenni Sidey

I find myself bothered by the relationship between bioethics and public health ethics. Is it that the former focuses on individuals and the latter on communities? What is the relationship between the individual and their communities? Practically speaking, bioethics has been institutionalized in ways that emphasize individual (patient) integrity, while public health ethics has been institutionalized more recently to emphasize collective well-being and justice. Yet, from a philosophical—or, if you prefer, impractical—perspective, these distinctions seem to me importantly arbitrary, a fact I once illustrated by losing the attention of nearly every clinical bioethicist during an invited grand rounds. The emerging field of environmental bioethics is, in part, an effort to reconcile the individual with their communities by articulating a view of interdependence rather than mere interconnection. Of course, environmental bioethics is rough around its edges, providing footholds for all sorts of philosophical climbing. As part of a recent workshop on environmental bioethics in Geneva, several of us mapped the various lines of theory across the field. We imagined intersecting axes (that is, more than one …

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Praiseworthiness

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Praiseworthiness

Published by Jenni Sidey

Zoë Johnson King is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She previously worked at the University of Southern California and New York University and studied at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge. She specializes in moral psychology, metaethics, ethics, epistemology, and their interactions, with a particular focus on what it means to try to be a good person despite living in a disappointing, confusing, and profoundly unjust world. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, she discusses her book on praiseworthiness, explaining why philosophical attention has focused too narrowly on blame, how traditions from Hume to Kant shape her account of moral agency, and why the ethics of praise matters deeply for everyday life. What is your work about? Why did you feel the need to write this work? My book, as the title suggests, about praiseworthiness. There is an enormous literature in philosophy—and in cognate fields, like law and psychology—that is ostensibly about moral agency and moral responsibility in general, …

What is Clinical Medicine? What Should it Be?

What is Clinical Medicine? What Should it Be?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Much attention has recently been given to discussing the effects, potential and actual, of artificial intelligence on clinical medicine. Many, like Sparrow & Hatherley, have begun anticipating and addressing the challenges arising from integrating AI into medicine, including concerns about privacy, bias, power, responsibility, trust, and empathy. Sometimes a dilemma is presented between, as Hatherley puts it, substitutionism and extensionism: either AI will surpass physicians in performing clinical tasks, thereby making physicians obsolete, or AI will extend and improve upon physicians’ capabilities. But to better appreciate the effects of AI on clinical medicine, one needs, I believe, a more comprehensive understanding of the nature and ambitions of the latter: If we understand what clinical medicine is or should be about, we will be in a better position to understand how AI might influence issues such as privacy, bias, power, responsibility, trust, and empathy, as well as what AI can and cannot substitute for or extend. In this post, I aim to give readers a sense of the complex nature of clinical medicine, with the hope …