Reviews for Occult Philosophy: An Introduction, the Major Concepts and a Glossary

The average rating for Occult Philosophy: An Introduction, the Major Concepts and a Glossary based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-20 00:00:00 James Murphy The content of this book is absolutely excellent. It covers a good deal of the most sophisticated material around at the time of its publication, and it cuts a wide swath through the discussion in contemporary philosophy of mind, exploring a lot of novel material (or at least what was novel at the time of publication) with some of the best thinkers in the field. The problem is partly exactly how much material the book tries to cover and the way that it jumps from place to place without adequately prefacing a lot of the material. It makes itself an expert-level text when it doesn't have to be. It could give a really fine introduction to a lot of material simply by offering a concise analysis of the arguments presented and giving the reader an opportunity to prepare for the content. Unfortunately, it loses out on a good opportunity to do that for no other reason than that it wants to keep the book under 400 pages, which it barely manages to do. At any rate, the book is well worth a read for those who are developing an advanced level of experience in philosophy of mind. If you're familiar with the writing of Fodor and Churchland and Dennett and Searle, then you're probably in fairly good shape to look at most of the sections in the book. There are a few chapters which get into the structure of mental content that are really cutting edge in contemporary philosophy of mind, and require a little bit of familiarity with some of the theories in semantics, but Richard Heck's chapter in the book does a good job at giving some of the general background. There are some things in the book that I think are just organizational mistakes. For instance, the organizers of the book offer a chapter from Jesse Prinz discussing a lot of the work done by Christopher Peacocke which spends a lot of time characterizing Peacocke's work, and then it follows up that chapter with a chapter from Peacocke, which spends a lot more time walking through Peacocke's work. The point here is that there are some issues with the editing that I was hoping wouldn't be problems in a volume published by a reputable group. That said, the quality of the philosophy is great, and many of the papers are very much worth the time and energy.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-09 00:00:00 Charles Glover A good cross section of different debates.