This is a book about the will, what
can be learned about it from various impairments of will and from its breakdown. 
It contains papers on the concept of will, the concept of its breakdown, and
the neurocognitive mechanisms of breakdown of will in schizophrenia,
depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse.

There are nearly three dozen
contributors and co-contributors as well as twenty papers including an introductory
overview chapter by the editors, co-authored with Daniel Dennett.  The authors
include philosophers like Tim Bayne, Neil Levy, Joelle Proust and Thomas Metzinger
(and Dennett, of course) and cognitive scientists, psychologists or neuroscientists
such as George Ainslie, Chris Firth, Patrick Haggard, Marc Jeannerod, Michael
Sayette, Werner Schneider, Prinz, and Sebanz.  A few psychiatrists are also
represented such as Peter Liddle and Sean Spence.  Authors’ affiliations span
the globe, from New York to Melbourne, from Tokyo to Mainz.

Many of the authors are major figures
in their respective fields.  Chris Frith, for example, is Professor of
Neuropsychology at University College London and the author of the
award-winning The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (1992). 
George Ainslie is the author of important papers on the topic of intertemporal
bargaining and of Breakdown of Will (2001).  Similar citations can be
made for many of the other authors.

The goal of the collection is to
show the reader what the study of volitional disorder is today, and what it
might be tomorrow.  This is a complex task that calls for offering some
conceptual analysis to represent different ways of botanizing the research
field, and representing main areas of empirical and psychiatric research.

Terminologically, this is not a
book to read in an airport lounge.  Investigators in different fields often
fail to talk of the same phenomena in the same way.  One author’s so-called
goal-action episodes are another’s segments of intentional activity and still another’s
units of motor activity under executive control.  It is challenging to keep the
locutions of twenty chapters in semantic play.  For this and other reasons, it’s
a collection for professionals by professionals.  This is not a drawback, of
course, but just an identification of its audience.  The book is intended to
advance scientific and medical understanding, not public attention.

Given the range of the contributors’
interests, the book examines a broad set of topics, such as: the phenomenology
of effort, models of self control, interconnections between cognition and
motivation, decision and affect, stress and mental disturbance, analogies
between bodily and mental action, neuroanatomical localization of a variety of
different cognitive-motivational functions, and task decomposition in decision
making and implementation of action.  Several striking theses emerge, such as:
Ainslie’s that rewards and pleasures must be distinguished; Bayne and Levy’s
that often there is a feeling of mental effort that needs to be invested in our
actions, and that this is perhaps most vivid in cases of motivational conflict;
Frith’s that some schizophrenic symptoms of action failure can only be
understood by taking into account the social context of action; Schneider’s
that in depression, chronic stress may lead to changes in brain structures that
support action planning; Sayette’s that the experience of craving leads to
changes in temporal cognition, causing time to seem to slow down.  Just to name
a handful.

Books like this — with many
authors and fields — sometimes fail for one of two reasons.  Either they are
topically anarchic, appearing as if three or four disparate academic journals
were glued together. Or under the rule of a stiff editorial architectonic, the
authors are uncomfortably forced to address topics about which they know little
or are disinterested.  The editors of this volume have sound organizational
instincts. No such faults occur in the collection. Different authors take on
different but often complementary and always enthusiastic roles.  Some refer to
the work of various scientific colleagues in the book (Sayette’s chapter is an
example).  Some offer big synoptic pictures that try to integrate the field
(Metzinger’s chapter is an example).  Others explain the continued evolution of
their own work (Frith’s chapter is an example). The result is a solid and
welcome collection that is informative, useful, and thought-provoking.  It will
be read with profit by mental health professionals and other scientists and
professionals interested in vicissitudes of intentional action and disturbances
of will.

© 2007 George Graham

George Graham is A. C. Reid
Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University in North Carolina (U.S.A).  He
is the co-editor and co-author of the Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and
Psychiatry. He can be reached via his website: http://www.wfu.edu/~grahamg and email
address: grahamg@wfu.edu.

Categories: Ethics, Philosophical, Psychology