NDPR Jeff Engelhardt Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.06.8 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Jeff Engelhardt, Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism, Oxford University Press, 2024, 216pp., $110.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197754191.

Reviewed by E. Díaz-León, University of Barcelona

Recently, analytic philosophy has paid increasing attention to the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theorizing in philosophy, and many philosophers have worried about the risks of problematic idealizations in philosophical theories. Engelhardt’s book, Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism, is a brilliant and much-needed contribution to this growing literature. Discussions about the dangers of ideal theories in philosophy have focused mostly on debates in political philosophy (e.g., Mills, 2005; Valentini, 2012; Hänel & Müller, 2025), although recently there has been interest in the issue in other sub-fields such as epistemology (McKenna, 2023), social ontology (Burman, 2023), and philosophy of language (Tirrell, 2018a;...