This is a collection of new papers, organized not so much by a shared theme as a shared orientation. The contributors, almost all philosophers, all work in naturalistically inclined philosophy of mind and agency. To that extent, the title is somewhat misleading: though there is indeed discussion of psychology, as traditionally understood, in these pages, the orientation is more toward the broader cognitive sciences than to psychology narrowly conceived.

Beyond the shared orientation, and the degree of unity in theme this orientation brings with it, there is relatively little to unify the collection. Even when papers, published here side by side, take up contrary positions on the same issue, the papers do not refer to each other. For instance, chapters 2 and 3 are both devoted to computationalism, with the first attacking it and the second defending it (albeit in a qualified manner). But the second chapter does not refer to the attack on computationalism in the first. Because there is relatively little unity to the collection beyond the thematic, the book is more or less the sum of its parts: no less, but not much more (frequent cross-referencing between the papers, presumably by the editors, ensures that the collection is a little more than that, but only a little).

That said, the parts are uniformly good. Most are by Italian philosophers, and from the quality of the contributions we can safely say that analytic philosophy in Italy is (somewhat unexpectedly for me) flourishing. The reader in Anglophone countries will also encounter some more familiar names, including some well-known and influential philosophers, such Alfred Mele and George Graham (here writing together with Ralph Kennedy) and some lesser known but fast rising names such as Tim Bayne and Eddy Nahmias. The themes covered range from synthaesthesia to self-deception, from the unity of consciousness to free will — across the gamut of core philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and also areas which abut these disciplines.

It is not possible to discuss all the 23 papers; indeed, few people will be qualified to comment competently on all this broad range of issues. Here I limit myself just to mentioning some of the papers which, for one reason or another, I found especially interesting.

Mario De Caro contributes a thought-provoking piece on the extent to which free will is a question for philosophers or for scientists. Not surprisingly, he defends a moderate view on which thinking about free will requires both conceptual and empirical work. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself tending more to the philosophical isolationist view. Fundamental physics is certainly best placed to answer some of the questions of interest to philosophers of free will: is determinism true, and if not are events at a (relatively) large scale like neural firings affected by indeterminism? But physics is actually making little progress at these questions, and for the moment the debate is largely philosophical. Neuroscience and psychology can also tell us a great deal about self-control, but the relevance of these findings to questions about free will is contestable. De Caro's paper should be read in conjunction with Eddy Nahmias's contribution on autonomous agency and social psychology. Nahmias offers some deflationary interpretations of some well-known social psychological findings, but recognizes that not all apparently disturbing results can be explained away in this manner. He suggests that these results nevertheless do not show that we cannot be autonomous agents; they show only that autonomy requires greater (and different) introspective knowledge, as well as knowledge of the external world, than we might have thought.

Michele di Francesco tackles the extended mind question; that is, the active externalism defended by Andy Clark and others. Di Francesco follows the now-familiar path of rejecting the sufficient conditions proposed by Clark and Chalmers for an extended process to count as mental. But his approach is novel, inasmuch as it is not so much their sufficiency that he questions (though he does argue that there is a sense in which mind is necessarily personal, and therefore has phenomenal content), but the right that Clark and Chalmers have to advance them at all. He suggests that from their perspective, these conditions are ad hoc and unmotivated.

Fiona Macpherson's contribution is a fascinating discussion of synaesthesia, the condition in which cross-modal perception (to put the point briefly but tendentiously) occurs; that is, subjects 'hear' colors or 'see' sounds. Philosophers too often make use of cases like this without an awareness of how complicated they can be. I urge them to read Macpherson's paper. Synaesthesia is not, after all, a cross-modal phenomenon: sometimes the additional experience can occur in the same modality. Moreover, the experience needn't be triggered by an actual perception; imagination can prompt it. All this careful discussion has a philosophical payoff; Macpherson then turns to a discussion of the claim that synaesthesia is a counterexample to functionalism. She concludes that it is a counterexample only to some versions of strong functionalism, not others.

There are many other papers in this collection equally worthy of readers' time. This is not a book that many will want to read right through. It is largely for specialists; those interested in topics covered here will find essential reading among the contributions.

© 2007 Neil Levy

Neil Levy, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow Program Manager, Ethical Issues in Biotechnology, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology