Philosophers of our Times

This collection of 18 lectures is drawn from the Annual Lecture series of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and features many famous names in the field. They address five groups of questions concerned with philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, questions of freedom and determinism in relation to identity and religion, political and social philosophy, and philosophy in a more general sense. Each is preceded by a helpful introduction by the editor, highlighting the context and main points. Topics include perception, mental representation, attention, intention, the good, reason, knowledge, belief and face, religious tolerance and moral agency. The content is somewhat technical, but pitched at a general level and therefore accessible to readers with less background.

Among the most interesting lectures for me were Mary Warnock on what is natural - asking if describing something as unnatural is an argument against it, in the context of genetic modification and cloning. She shows how people use different kinds of argument, some scientific, some religious and some political - or even a mixture of all three. There is an excellent exposition of free will as a problem in neurobiology by John Searle, and the final lecture by David Chalmers asks why there isn't more progress in philosophy. Since it is largely a matter of argument as distinct from proof or scientific method, philosophy tends to deal in sophisticated disagreements, depending on your viewpoint. He illustrates this with May 2009 survey calibrating answers to 30 important questions in philosophy asking why there is less convergence then in the hard sciences. Premises can be denied and inferences rejected, and there are many different kinds of explanation. Reader will find much to grapple with in this fine collection.