The thesis contained in this book will not please all, but it will please some. It certainly pleased me. Peter Carruthers, in this book, defends the view that the languages in which we speak are more than a simple tool for communication. Language, he argues, creates consciousness in human beings. ie, take away language, and you take away much of what it means to be human. The book is fairly heavyweight in terms of its academic credibility, and contains much vivid discussion of some the ideas aruond in philosophical cognition around today (eg Fodor, Searle, Dennett). However, it is not a difficult read. If you are intestested in what makes us human, then this book is for you.

The title of the book is, in my opinioin, misleading. It is not a philosophical analysis of psychology as a science or a field of research activity. Rather, it analysis common-sense (folk) psychology in the light of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy. To a reader interesed in this special subject, the book is an excellent overview of (and contribution to) the current state of the art. But if you buy it for its more widely promising title, you may be disappointed.

This volume is an excellent, broad-ranging introduction to leading issues in philosophy of psychology and empirical philosophy of mind. The authors introduce the views and leading authors in such contemporary debates as: modularity and nativism, folk psychology/"mindreading", the language of thought and mental representation, computational cognitivism vs. connectionism, consciousness, evolutionary perspectives (to some extent), the rationality debate, broad vs. narrow content, and others. I beg to differ with the other reviewers narrow view of this book. It is beautifully well-written and accessible. It is an introduction and so leaves much room for further study.

Carruthers arrives at a conclusion which a lot of people will not like, while a lot of others will be satisfied: carefully arguing with precise logic on the basis of Rawls's contractualism, Carruthers concludes that animals cannot have rights. An appreciation of this kind of book depends a lot on the reader's initial standpoint in the matter, but the least one can say is that the book is well written, even if one doesn't share the author's opinion. However, "The animals issue" would have been better and more credible if the author had left out his last chapter, in which he hypothesizes that animals do not have consciousness.