Review of the book "Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays", C. Mole, D. Smithies, & W. Wu (Eds)

Abstract

Explaining attention is a big job. Some headway has been made in "Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays", which comprises fourteen chapters—five by psychologists and neuroscientists, and nine by philosophers—and an introductory essay by the editors. Some of the contributions are reviews of parts of the scientific literature by neuroscientists and psychologists; among these, some fail to engage with the broader metaphysical issues, and thus could be found as review chapters in a neuroscience or psychology handbook. But the majority here describe broad philosophical implications of theories of attention as well as their empirical foundations.