Philosophers of Our Times

Edited by Ted Honderich

Oxford University Press, £19.99

Since 1998 the Royal Institute of Philosophy has been hosting a prestigious annual lecture and some of the world's leading academic philosophers have been invited to speak. It is important to stress the word 'academic'. As Ted Honderich explains in his introduction, the lectures printed here are not from the school of popularisation. They come straight from the scholarly coal face. As a result, some of them will initially puzzle the general reader but, as Honderich writes about one piece, "even if the thinking is not easy, concentration on it will be rewarded." Honderich's mini-intros to each chapter help a great deal by explaining the technicalities, and the deeper you delve into the book the more comfortable things become. You grow increasingly accustomed to the rules and techniques of high-level philosophising and you may even start to feel rather pleased with your sharpened analytical skills. You will have to read some sentences a few times but is this so terrible? How often do we finish a non-fiction book and declare that it was a wonderful page-turner, only to realise, a couple of weeks later, that we can't remember much of what we read? The challenging volumes linger longer in our thoughts.

The book's first section, on the philosophy of mind, is arguably the most difficult. The lectures deal with the philosophy of mind. The contributors are an impressive bunch (Thomas Nagel, Peter Strawson, Tyler Burge, Ned Block, and Jerry Fodor) and they tackle, often from radically different perspectives, a host of head-spinning questions. What is the nature of consciousness and how is it related to the physical brain? Is consciousness itself a purely physical state or something else? I rather liked Nagel's admission that, while there is patently a relationship between our brains and consciousness (how could things be otherwise?) there is every possibility that we will never understand it. This may sound like surrender. In fact it plays by one of the cardinal rules of philosophical enquiry: that there is wise humility in recognising that we'll never know everything.

Other fascinating topics make an appearance in this section: from the processes of sense perception to the differences between conscious and unconscious mental representations. Philosophers have been struggling with such issues for a very long time. I look at, say, a purple tulip in springtime. What is the relationship between the perceived object and its viewer? Is there a common 'language' of perception in all human brains? Does the viewer, in all sorts of important ways, create the world around him or is it there before she takes a glance? I gave up worrying too much about such issues long ago - I'm simply pleased when the purple tulips in my garden make it through another winter - but it is nice to be reminded of these tortuous and fundamental conundrums.

The lectures devoted to moral philosophy are somewhat easier going. Christine Korsgaard offers sage words on the basic concept of declaring that something is good, and Simon Blackburn's typically excellent piece brings us to the heart of the matter: is moral judgement a quest for truth or simply an expression of desire. Mary Warnock, as so often, relates rarefied philosophising to the real world. We sometimes assume that if something is 'natural' then it is 'good' but this raises difficulties. First, how does one define 'natural' and, second, ought we to assume that something that isn't 'natural' is bad? Imagine a human child produced through cloning. This, presumably, would be regarded as unnatural (no conventional sexual process or even high-tech interchange of male and female genetic components would have been involved) but, assuming that all health risks had been avoided, how would we conceptualise the resulting infant?

Limits of space only allow brief mention of John Searle discussing determinism, Derek Parfit musing about the criteria of personal identity, and Noam Chomsky bashing the pulpit with his customary vigour. I must, though, end with praise for the late great Bernard Williams whose contribution reminds us that philosophy, for all its debts to the scientific paradigm, must remain a discipline of the humanities: relishing its own history and history in the round. And then there is David Chalmers. He asks the most awkward question. Why is there so little progress in philosophy? We have been at it for a very long time but we are more distant than ever from a consensus on the most fundamental questions. This must alarm those who sing from the hymn-sheet of objective philosophical truth.

The editor promises "arresting propositions, ingenuities, maybe some shocks" and they all arrive on schedule. More questions are raised than answered but this, as Honderich puts it, is the fecund uncertainty of the lecture hall.