This text would be an excellent reader for a number of possible courses including, at the undergraduate level, a first philosophy of mind intensive course, or perhaps a more general course which includes a section on philosophy of mind. At the graduate level, the book could serve as an excellent background or overview piece. The collection has all the basics of a good course reader including an index, suggestions for further readings, a clear introduction to the area and an extremely affordable price tag. What makes it stand out as above-average are the comprehensive chronology, which parallels important events in philosophy of mind to the political climate and scientific discoveries, and more importantly, careful organization which leads the reader naturally from one topic to the next while retaining near chronological order. Thus, together with the introduction, this group of essays forms a coherent picture of the development of many of the theses which comprise the philosophy of mind. As well, each essay is a clear expression of the central tenets of the philosophy of its author, providing the reader with the customary name connected to various '-isms' and theories. For example, we have Hilary Putnam telling us of functionalism, U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart describing the identity theory and Paul Churchland trying to convince us that eliminative materialism is our best possible theory of mind.

For those more familiar with the territory of current philosophy of mind, these essays do well to remind us of the historical roots of various issues. For example, Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?' contains the central contentions of those defending the existence of a 'hard problem' of consciousness . Similarly, there are instances of Wittgenstein's anticipation of prototype theory and James' expecting something like a dynamic systems approach to be successful in describing conscious behavior. In this respect, Lyons has compiled an excellent review of the philosophical and psychological thought which serves as a precedence for much current discussion in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

In themselves the essays focus on the classic problems and themes of philosophy of mind such as behaviorism, the mind-body problem, subjective experience, functionalism, intentionality, and consciousness. However, in the course of the discussion of these subjects a wide variety of others are introduced, including introspectionism, folk psychology, materialism, propositional attitudes, the medium of thought, and artificial intelligence. Nothing so recent as concerns about non-conceptual content, symbolic versus distributed representation, computation, or embeddedness are mentioned. Nevertheless, these essays provide a necessary introduction to the concepts being used (and often challenged) by more contemporary discussions. In all, the scope of the book is admirably broad but not so much so as to result in a watered-down, uninteresting or confusing survey.