Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Philosophy

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to philosophy

Posted on March 20, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on philosophy. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Until our lungs give out: conversations on race, justice, and the future
Yancy, George. Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

Having admired the philosophical career and writings of George Yancy (philosophy, Emory Univ.) for some time, this reviewer can confidently assert that Until Our Lungs Give Out is another significant contribution to a long series of important texts on race and inclusion. Yancy’s works are never easy, nor are they designed to pacify readers, even those who agree with their premises. His works are designed to open dialogues in an honest, vulnerable, and productive manner. This collected volume portrays individuals speaking honestly about their experiences, academic studies, and community involvement in a way that demonstrates how difficult conversations on topics such as the innocence of whiteness, body perceptions, and local and global racial discrimination can be meaningfully conducted. While emotion is honestly portrayed and acknowledged, the discussions are critical and philosophical. The speakers adhere to reasoned discussion and philosophical standards of argumentation. Indeed, when contextualized, each conversation represents a cogent response to the situations examined. In following philosophical rules of engagement, the book challenges readers to recognize and own their reactions to what is said and to engage in an active rather than passive reading experience. View on Amazon

2. Dancing with the devil: why bad feelings make life good
Thomason, Krista K. Oxford, 2023

This reviewer has read hundreds of books on emotion during his career, and this one is far and away among the very best. The devil in the title is a reference to the so-called bad emotions—envy, spite, anger, contempt, jealousy, and Schadenfreude (a German term that translates as “shadow joy,” the emotion one feels when someone else gets their just desserts)—which Thomason (Swarthmore College) contends are a natural part of the human repertoire of emotions.  A philosopher and author of Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life (CH, Dec’18, 56-1740), Thomason examines each of the emotions in the lineup above and argues forcefully that all of them are “part of a good life,” and that when one feels them, one should remember that emotions concern the things one values in life, and sand as such should be accepted and valued for what they may reveal about oneself. With thousands of years of philosophy at her command, Thomason speaks directly to the reader in a conversational manner that is accessible, compelling, and sparkles with grace and wit. Readers will never feel the same again about feeling bad. View on Amazon

3. Wisecracks: humor and morality in everyday life
Shoemaker, David. Chicago, 2024

In this engaging new work, Shoemaker (Cornell Univ.) offers an important and nuanced contribution to the philosophy of humor. Quite a lot of the philosophical literature on humor focuses on jokes or on attempts to work out the nature of the relevant emotional or psychological states (amusement, a disposition to laughter, etc.). Shoemaker begins instead with the study of wisecracks—“the banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery that happen between people in everyday life who know each other” (p. 1). Making wisecracks the central point of discussion allows him to talk about humor as something embedded in social behaviors and contexts, which has the salutary effect of enabling a more complex approach to thinking about the intersection of morality and amusement. Wisecracks, as Shoemaker understands them, are the site of both moral affirmation and moral complication; they are “the arena in which the funny interacts with the moral in virtue of the way they both tap into empathy” (p. 196). View on Amazon

4. Wonderstruck: how wonder and awe shape the way we think De Cruz, Helen. Princeton, 2024

Written in a careful, clear, and distinct style, this magisterial volume will help the reader comprehend more effectively the surrounding world by acknowledging that one observes it through the lens of awe and wonder. De Cruz (philosophy, Saint Louis Univ.) first defines these terms and then examines how from antiquity to the present, awe and wonder—as epistemic emotions—encourage humans to examine the world in which they find themselves. De Cruz finds and examines strains of such thought, and its consequences, in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, William James, Rachel Carson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Heschel. The author is remarkably adept in defining her terms and giving examples of them. She uses her knowledge of the history of philosophy, psychology, and science to substantiate her perspective on the role and distinctive contribution of awe and wonder in nourishing how science and knowledge of the world evolves. View on Amazon.

5. Aesthetic action Klinger, Florian. Stanford, 2024

In the beginning was the deed, and the deed was aesthetic. So writes Klinger (Univ. of Chicago) in Aesthetic Action, a systematic proposal for a sweeping overhaul of traditional, philosophical aesthetics. Drawing on an erudite array of philosophical sources, Klinger argues for a reformulation of aesthetics, moving it away from what is needed to equip specialists (i.e., salon-like arbiters who deploy a judgment-apparatus and exercise “judgments of taste”), toward a more theatrical model of aesthetic experience, as glimpsed in improvisational theater, where both the artist and the audience find themselves as co-performers in the same unfolding “aesthetic action.” By conceiving aesthetics as a collaborative enterprise where production and reception are mutually integral, Klinger is able to democratize the core concepts of aesthetics: “We thus need to recover a sense of legitimacy in speaking of the act of viewing, listening, touching … in addition to the more established tropes, such as act of painting, singing, building.” Compellingly argued, this ground-breaking book culminates with a series of helpful applications involving case studies of such challenging, contemporary artists as Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, and Mazen Kerbaj. View on Amazon.

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