Daniel Robinson

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it might seem that questions about the nature of the mind are best left to scientists rather than philosophers. How could the views of Aristotle or Descartes or Kant possibly contribute anything to debates about these issues, when the relevant neurophysiological facts and principles were completely unknown to them? This Oxford Reader shows that the arguments of philosophers throughout history still provide essential insights into contemporary questions about the mind and help to clarify the underlying scientific assumptions. Contributions from thinkers ranging from Plato and Locke to Roger Penrose and Oliver Sacks show that appreciating the full complexity of debates about consciousness, intelligence, and perception demands attention to fundamental questions that have occupied philosophers for over two thousand years.

In his preface to Mental Reality the author cautions that much of what appears in the book has surely been said before, noting that he has probably forgotten some of his own debts. However, the pages that follow turn out to be paradoxically original and unsurprising; original, against the contemporary background of all too many thick-but-thin disquisitions on the same subject, and unsurprising owing to the author's respect for such authority as mind might claim in the matter of self-understanding. The broad perspective, set forth in the first chapter, is something of a common-sense and realist psychology not unlike what one might find in Reid or in William James. It is tested by post-Wittgenstein, post-Ryle philosophies of mind, but is not chastened by them. Gone is the theater of experience, but experience itself suffers neither neurophysiological nor metaphysical impertinences!

“FITNESS FOR THE RULE OF LAW” lends itself to a variety of treatments. I should make clear at the outset one treatment that I do not intend to provide under this heading, even if it is implicitly represented here and there in this essay. I will not examine psychological or psychiatric conceptions of “fitness” as these are featured in, for example, the “insanity defense” or in tests of testamentary capacity. A recent book of mine explores these issues in some historical and analytical detail, but this is a vast and complex subject falling beyond the scope of what I hope to clarify here. I shall assume throughout that the minimal conditions by which one becomes fit for the rule of law are satisfied, and will focus then on how one’s potentialities for life within such a context are realized.

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience? _Consciousness and Mental Life_ questions our present approach to the study of consciousness and the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time. Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, _Consciousness and Mental Life_ corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness

Contrary to the estimation of Reid’s close friend and admiring biographer, Dugald Stewart, the correspondence of Thomas Reid is of great interest. Not only do the letters offer more than a hint of the extraordinary breadth of Reid’s interests, but they reinforce conclusions reached by his readers as to the intellectual integrity, the fairness, and the modesty of this central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Credit is due to Paul Wood for including all of the known letters to and from Reid, and to the General Editor, Knud Haakonssen, for the entire ten-volume Edinburgh Edition of Reid’s works. It will not be until 2007 that the entire set is available, but the volumes published to date leave no doubt as to the high standards of scholarship and the comparably high production value reserved for this undertaking.