Profession

I've been away from academia since I dropped out of philosophy grad school in 1997, so I'm out of touch with recent developments in philosophy. What are the most significant philosophical books or papers of the past eight or so years? (My main areas of interest in grad school were metaphysics and philosophy of language, but I'd be interested in your answer whatever your specialty.)

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This question is very difficult to answer. A lot depends on what one values in philosophy. That said...

The most important work in the history of philosophy to have been published in the last decade is J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Schneewind not only essentially invents the history of modern moral philosophy as a subfield of the history of philosophy, but he also demonstrates the philosophical significance of large-scale, contextual approaches to historical texts.

The most significant work in ethics to have been published is T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other. It's advances a framework for understanding ethics that could have as great an influence on that field as Rawls' A Theory of Justice had on political philosophy.

Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge, is a revolutionary book that should reorient a nest of questions at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, the theory of knowledge, and moral philosophy.

If I could look back slightly farther than you asked to the last decade in philosophy of mind, I think one of the most important books published was David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind (1996). This book brought consciousness back to the forefront of discussion.

One important trend in philosophy of mind in the last decade has been the advent of representationalism -- the view that consciousness (or what we might call phenomenal character) ultimately reduces to representational content. Important books on representationalism and related issues include Michael Tye's Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995), Fred Dretske's Naturalizing the Mind (1995), and Charles Siewert's The Significance of Consciousness (1998), though there are many others.

Philosophy tends not to move terribly quickly, and it's always difficult to tell, from "up close", what will prove to have been important. That said, however, there have been some important developments in philosophy of language (one area you mentioned over the last decade). It's less a matter of individual pieces of work and more a matter of orientation and general progress. As a result of several forces, the question how the meaning of an utterance depends upon the circumstances in which that utterance is made has become very hot, and it seems that enough has been learned in surrounding areas to make this exceedingly difficult question discussable at this point. Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen recently published a book, Insensitive Semantics, that discusses this issue. I don't find their view convincing, but they do a very nice job of laying out the options, so it would make a good introduction to the state of the art.

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