Reviews for Neurotransmitters and Neuromodulators: Handbook of Receptors and Biological Effects

The average rating for Neurotransmitters and Neuromodulators: Handbook of Receptors and Biological Effects based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-08 00:00:00 Elise Conte Architecture was recommended to me by one of my heroes in academic philosophy, Ned Block, as a way to take a philosophical look at cognitive psychology and especially comparative psychology. It lived up to the strong recommendation that it was given, and then some. First of all, this is an incredibly technical work, especially the opening few chapters which work a lot in cognitive and comparative psychology. Carruthers has a lot of ground to cover, and does so rather quickly. He basically has to update his version of modularity to distance it from the classical view proposed by Jerry Fodor decades ago. He's proposing a major update to a hotly disputed view, and the update is hugely successful. He argues it well, but the territory that he has to cover in order to get there is dizzying even to those familiar with the technical literature. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is outside the field; it's too much technical work and to referential to a large body of scientific literature that unless you have a familiarity with some of the content of comparative psychology, it is hard to orient yourself. Carruthers presents an incredibly careful and conservative argument, moving himself away from the modularity of Fodor, cherry-picking the points he thinks can be supported and distancing himself from the ones that can't. In doing this, he comes to stand above the debate in contemporary philosophy of mind regarding massive modularity. He presents a position palatable to many on either side of the debate, scoring point and articulating ideas thoughtfully and with a careful consideration for those who will likely disagree, or resent his adopting a particular terminology. The book is an exercise in measured finesse. The arguments are ultimately technical ones, and the ideas valuable primarily (and perhaps solely) to theorists who are interested in the structure of the mind, but for those individuals Carruthers offers a careful and compelling analysis of both the state of play and an approach that is conciliatory and engaging, as well as one that is accessible across the sub-disciplines (philosophy, psychology, biology, etc.) that are engaged in this issue. For those (like me) interested in developing a framework for the discussion of the mind into the future, Carruthers is invaluable both for the mass of the material and for the modeling of the approach.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-16 00:00:00 Isabel Pereira I'll be so mad if I don't end up citing this book at least 20 times. As the other reviewer said, this is a technical book. It probably won't even fall into your hands unless you are deep in a university library somewhere. My supervisor recommended this book as general reading around my topic, and yup, extensive notes were taken. While I can't say that I've read and digested every word of every argument, it appears to be very thorough and more elaborated than similar texts from the dual-systems/processes/types/minds (because consistent terminology is for pussies) theory side of things. The clear structuring into chapters-> sections-> subsections is also extremely helpful, as are internal references to previous/following sections of the book for more extensive argumentation of some topics. Idk, may be this is just good practice in academic texts, but I haven't seen this done this clearly before, so I'm impressed.