The Laboratory of the Mind was written with two purposes in mind. The first was to contribute to the growing literature on thought experiments (TE) with a selection of the most interesting examples of the genre. The second and much more ambitious purpose was to serve as a “first attempt at a (modern) rationalist interpretation of science” (p. x).

Contemporary writing on human action sometimes distinguishes a presentoriented form of intentionality from a future-oriented form. Tense is then invoked mainly for a classificatory purpose, with little regard in this context to whether it may not have analytical (and therefore closer) connections with intentionality in general. That merits some surprise, in view of the crucial role assumed, in current debate between A- and B-theories of time on the subject of tense, by a wider intentionality that extends to cognitive and other mental states. In the wider context there is room for an interesting antithesis between analyses of the temporal in terms of intentionalistic concepts and retroanalyses that go the other way.

Law's Empire is a bold and ambitious attempt to provide a philosophical framework which will serve to install the judicial perspective as the preferred perspective from which to think about theories of law. The heart of its argument is that judicial determination of what constitutes law is an exercise in constructive interpretation. Judges have the responsibility to seek that story of the law that both fits reasonably with its past political history and constitutes the best justification that can be given of the legal practices of the society as a whole. They are engaged in finding an account consistent with the history of the practice that displays the point, purpose(s) and values that the law serves to express and uphold, and so brings out most fully the law's claim to authority as a legitimate expression of governmental power in that society. Dworkin believes that the interpretation of law that best satisfies these conditions is law as integrity, which conceives of law as expressing a coherent set of principles embodying those substantive ideas of justice, fairness and procedural fairness that are respected in the community. Integrity tells judges to identify legal rights and duties as though they were all created by a single author, the community personified, as an embodiment of a coherent conception of justice and fairness to which the community subscribes. In this way, integrity requires judges to interpret the rules of law as having a principled justification in a network of values and moral principles that the society adopts.

La thèse centrale de van Fraassen dans son dernier ouvrage est que son interprétation modale de la mécanique quantique (MQ) constitue une variante admissible de l'interprétation de Copenhague et que cette variante est résolument empiriste. Les moyens mis en œuvre pour défendre la thèse sont considérables – l'auteur fait appel à toutes les ressources de la littérature contemporaine sur la MQ et discute la plupart des auteurs pertinents – et le résultat est à la hauteur (considérable aussi) des promesses de l'ouvrage. Mais la thèse, abritée sous le couvert d'un œcuménisme herméneutique (p. viii), ne parvient pas à dégager du dogme empiriste une interprétation de la MQ suffisamment radicale pour lui assurer un statut indépendant. C'est sous le signe du rationalisme cartésien que van Fraassen a d'ailleurs voulu placer son entreprise, puisqu'il cite dans l'épigraphe de son ouvrage (aussi p. 335–336) le Descartes des Principes de la philosophie (IV, 204): «Que touchant les choses que les sens n'aperçoivent point, il suffit d'expliquer comment elles peuvent être […]». Et Descartes d'ajouter: «C'est tout ce qu'Aristote a fait».

Can we succeed in giving consciousness a naturalistic explanation, that is, an explanation in “broadly physical terms” (p. 23)? This is the “problem of consciousness” which, along with other aspects of the mind-body problem, is explored by McGinn in a collection of eight independently written but related, sometimes overlapping papers, all but two previously published. The papers span a decade and divergent approaches. The resulting juxtaposition of two contrasting “resolutions” of the problem by the same author invites their comparison.

Henry Allison's very challenging and very rewarding book provides an analysis and defence of Kant's theory of freedom in both its theoretical and practical dimensions. His defence is qualified, acknowledging some “details” which are not defensible and some inconsistencies; however, “given a sympathetic understanding of transcendental idealism, a good case can be made for Kant's incompatibilistic conception of freedom” (p. 3). In addition to arguing that the notion of transcendental freedom is intelligible, Allison seeks to show that it is essential to Kant's theory, taking issue with those who would replace it with a more palatable, compatibilist conception. He thus has two targets: those who doubt the profundity and coherence of Kant's theory of freedom, and those who seek to defend Kant by trying to “gain a hearing for his views by depicting him as anticipating contemporary forms of compatibilism” (p. 249).

It is a curious feature of Hegelian studies in English that its practitioners seem incapable of tackling their subject without first disclaiming any adherence to the more metaphysical side of Hegel's thought, be it called “speculative metaphysics,” “dialectical logic” or whatever. I say “curious” because I doubt that the same scholars would feel obliged to enter an equivalent disclaimer at the head of a study on, say, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza or even Newton—even though all of these classics have a metaphysical side at least as abstruse as any of Hegel's worse romantic excesses. Hegel himself, if he could witness the practice, would be flattered by it. He would not see it as an indication that “the problems of [his] logic remain alien and artificial to us in ways that the problems of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy do not” (p. 5) but, on the contrary, as a hidden acknowledgement that, whether for good or bad, his philosophy is still alive, still so close to our culture that we instinctively feel the need of exorcizing it ritually, like a demon capable of frightening us.

Stephen Braude, a philosopher, believes that scientists, scholars and intellectuals ignore the wide range of evidence for psychic phenomena. They dismiss what is known and refuse to inquire further. He uses strong words such as “intellectual dishonesty and cowardice.” He means me and probably you. He made these allegations in his second book on parapsychology, The Limits of Influence, which is subtitled Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science. It was published in 1986. The editor of Dialogue thought that the charges had not been adequately discussed, and that the appearance of a paperbound edition would be a good occasion to treat them seriously.

Hubert Dreyfus's commentary on Being and Time has been a long time in preparation but it has also been worth the wait. Dreyfus limits his account to the first division of Part I of Being and Time with some passages from Division II brought into the discussion. For Dreyfus, the first 230 pages of Being and Time comprise Heidegger's most important metaphysical innovations, while Division II, the “existentialist” side of Heidegger, contains discussions of death, guilt, resoluteness and Angst rarely, if ever, mentioned in any other works.

Pollock's How to Build a Person is a highly sophisticated defence of the “strong” Artificial Intelligence (AI) program within the framework of a physicalist/functionalist ontology. Its central thesis is as robust as any defender of strong AI could possibly want it to be: to build a person—“a thing that literally thinks, feels, and is conscious” (p. ix)—is to build a physical system that adequately models human rationality; and building such a system is, essentially, a computational task. The epistemological groundwork for the computational task (a task already underway at the University of Arizona under the name “the OSCAR project”) is sketched in the sixth and last chapter of the book—a 64-page-long chapter (“Cognitive Carpentry”) where Pollock presents the main lines of a general theory of rationality which he has been developing over the course of many years. The bulk of the book (chaps. 1 to 4) is devoted to an articulation and defence of what Pollock takes to be the metaphysical underpinnings of his conception of a person as an intelligent machine: token-physicalism, agent materialism, psychophysical supervenience and (a form of) analytical functionalism. This part of the book, which will be the focus of this review, provides an account of “the physical basis for mentality”—an account of what it is that makes a physical structure capable of having mental states relevantly like our own. And since on the proposed account mental capacity “involves a way of codifying information—a system of mental representations” (p. 93), Pollock devotes a chapter (chap. 5) to the semantics of “the language of thought”; though basically a digression, since “semantics plays no role” in the computations involved in rational thought, the chapter is intrinsically very interesting, bearing as it does on current debates on thought ascription and content individuation.

This book on the Tractatus is lauded, on the dust jacket, as “the first to make sense of the work as a whole.” Both new and veteran readers of Wittgenstein, we are told, “will benefit from Donald Peterson's exceptionally clear explication and commentary on this crucial work of the twentieth century.” Grand claims, these; and both of them arguably false. To be sure, Peterson writes well; and there are parts of the book—especially those dealing with Wittgenstein's Grundgedanke (chap. 4) and Notation (chap. 7)—from which all will benefit. But the clarity of his writing can beguile neophyte and incautious veteran alike into supposing that the ideas he explicates are Wittgenstein's rather than the author's own.