Robert Talisse
speaker
27,453 appearances
146 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2011
last heard Jan 2025
Robert Talisse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello and thank you for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network.
I'm Robert Talise and I am professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
I co host the program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson.
Today my guest is Michael Firstin.
Michael is professor of philosophy at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota.
He works in social and political philosophy with an emphasis in democratic theory.
His new book has just been published with Oxford University Press and it is titled Experiments in Living Together How Democracy Drives Social Progress.
Now, various kinds of philosophical considerations have been offered in favor of democracy.
By some accounts, democracy realizes some intrinsic value.
Like equality or collective autonomy.
According to other kinds of view, democracy's value is instrumental.
It tends to produce or promote certain kinds of social goods.
Here, people will point to certain forms of stability and prosperity and even peace.
However, a long-standing alternative tradition of democratic thinking locates democracy's value in its capacity to make social and moral progress.
Here the idea isn't so much that democracy produces some already identified social good.
but rather that democracy fosters a kind of social and moral discovery and implementation.
Of course, this view raises several philosophical questions.
What counts as progress, for example?
How does democracy tend to catalyze progress is another question.
Now, in experiments in living together, Michael Ferstein draws on normative and empirical considerations in proposing a systematic account of democracy's capacity to foster progress.
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