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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2022.06.04 View this Review Online  

Babette Babich (ed.), Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” De Gruyter, 2019, 333pp., $25.99 (pbk), ISBN 9783110585643.

Reviewed by Stephanie Ross, University of Missouri–St. Louis  This book edited by Babette Babich is a welcome addition to scholarship focusing on Hume’s famous piece on aesthetics. Babich has assembled 12 papers as well as a copy of Hume’s 1757 essay that the papers address. The selections are grouped in three clusters titled “Of Taste and Standards,” “Causal Theory and the Problem, Dispositional Critique and the Classic,” and “Comparisons, Art, Anatomies,” but the collection might just as easily have been partitioned differently. For example, one alternative organization might first present papers that seek to explicate Hume’s theory and trace its relations to his classic earlier writings, then present…

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2022.06.07 View this Review Online  

Manon Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives, Princeton University Press, 2021, 234pp., $22.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691223209.

Reviewed by Ellie Anderson, Pomona College Five years after the climax of #metoo, a surprising development is afoot: women’s submission is trending. The tradwife movement in Britain and the Christian US celebrates housewives submitting to their husbands “like it’s 1959,” as blogger Alena Kate Pettitt puts it. In a more ironic vein, TikTok videos about smooth-brained bimbo feminism encourage young women to give in to the objectification that society inevitably places on them. In such a landscape, the question arises: Why do so many women consent to their own submission? This is precisely the question guiding Manon Garcia’s book. Garcia’s answer is that femininity is itself…

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“At its best, McPherson’s book calls us to recognize the importance of an objective view of the good, one that deserves our recognition and respect and that imposes limits on the ways in which we navigate the world. As such, it is a contribution to an important strand of ethical thought.”

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“In 2022, five decades will have passed since the first publication of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and the beginning of the referentialist revolution regarding proper names and natural kind terms. The publication of Gregory Bochner’s book fits perfectly with this anniversary. On the one hand, it contains an excellent critical overview of the most important contemporary debates regarding proper names; on the other, it offers a presentation and defense of an original account of proper names—metasyntactic two-dimensionalism. This book is published in the Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics series, which aims to combine exposition with original philosophical contributions, so as to attract those interested in an introduction to a particular topic as well as those who are subject matter experts. It realizes this aim in an exemplary manner.”

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