Books

A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! (Tell It Slant Press, 2022). [At Amazon]

“Part of the joy of philosophy is the experience of trying on someone else’s vocabulary, concerns, convictions, and habits of reasoning, and seeing how our own are transformed in the process. I think I have never read anything that is so full of this joy.” — Ian Olasov

“Kierkegaard meets Calvino meets autotheory” — Susanna Siegel

“Imagine a joke that begins, “Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Bruce Wayne walk into a Yeshiva….” and you will glimpse what awaits you in A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. Astonishingly creative, intellectually rich, and personally intimate, Evnine’s text shatters the boundaries of conventional philosophical writing, to enchanting effect.” — David Livingstone Smith

Making Object and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (Oxford University Press, 2016). [At OUP]

“Simon J. Evnine has written a superb book. It is detailed, profound, and carefully argued, with extremely well-informed discussions of views that have a bearing on his own account. Evnine is careful to make clear the relevance of many different issues to each other. The book is impressive in scope…Anyone interested in a sophisticated and lucid investigation of a plethora of issues in contemporary metaphysics would benefit from Making Objects and Events. I recommend it highly.” — Lynne Rudder Baker, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online

“Evnine’s book deserves a wide readership. Although it is primarily a work of analytic metaphysics, it touches on topics of interest to, or has interesting implications for, philosophers working in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of biology, political philosophy, philosophical theology, and the philosophy of action. Aside from some occasional but very dense forays into analytic metaphysics–for which only the specialist will have the required patience–the prose makes for delightful reading and Evnine’s arguments are easy to follow.” — Christopher Brown, Review of Metaphysics

Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood (Oxford University Press, 2008) [At OUP]

“Simon Evnine’s new book Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood… has many virtues: it is clearly written and well argued… its main themes are thought-provoking as well as provocative; it is rich in interesting ideas; it is concise and goes into details; last but not least, it presents a big picture involving core issues for the philosophy of the mind and logic as well as from epistemology and the theory of action… Evnine’s book is a welcome addition to the existing literature; everyone interested in epistemology or the philosophy of mind will greatly benefit from reading it.” — Peter Baumann, Mind

“Evnine’s book is in the main wonderfully clear, and offers detailed arguments about several central issues in the theory of epistemic rationality. It makes a nice entry point for readers new to the topics discussed… Evnine’s stated goal is not to reshape our understanding of epistemic rationality, but to defend a ‘traditional’ conception of persons as rational in some fairly specific ways… the book does offer a highly readable exploration of just how far one can go toward that conception.” — Krista Lawlor, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Evnine’s book is clearly and honestly written, ambitious and unusually imaginative. It brings the themes of epistemic rationality and personhood together in several unexpected ways.” — David Christensen, publisher’s blurb

Donald Davidson (Stanford University Press, 1991) [At SUP]

“I had not dared to hope such a clear and sensible book would, or even could, be written about my work. Evnine has made ideas that readers have often found obscure and difficult in my writings accessible, and he has deftly emphasized important connections. I can’t agree with everything in the book, since Evnine does not accept all my views. This is all to the good: a book as interesting and intelligently sympathetic could not have been written by someone without convictions of his own.” — Donald Davidson, publisher’s blurb

“Evnine has done the philosophical community a genuine favor by supplying a highly readable and coherent presentation of Davidson’s complex and important writings. At the same time he is able to expose in a gentle way the fundamental problem in Davidson’s work. Donald Davidson is, quite simply, a model of charitable yet critical philosophical exegesis.” — Robert Hanna, Review of Metaphysics