Mind and Body

There are dozens of introductions to philosophy of mind, and several on the Blackwell list of the past 10 years.

Does the world, and Blackwell, need another? Well, the first thing to note is that despite, or perhaps because, writing intro's to phil of mind is something of a cottage industry, many of them aren't that good, and many are pitched too high for the larger classes (the numbers studying philosophy of mind drop off pretty substantially beyond the intermediate level).

Secondly, philosophy of mind remains both a key, high-enrollment area and a high profile field.

The good books in this area tend to get noticed. It is an area that sits atop some pretty fundamental fault lines in the discipline, in addition to interfacing with other, empirical, disciplines.

A successful book will be one which is both sensitive to the traditional metaphysical issues that remain central to the teaching of philosophy of mind to undergraduates but which also navigates the increasingly empirical turn in the contemporary field.

So, we need to continually invest in the best authorship for this flagship area of philosophy publishing. Some of our titles have been effectively upper level (Rey, Jackson and Braddon-Mitchell), and others too quirky in style and coverage (Guttenplan).

In fact, none of our pedagogical titles in this area have done especially well in the US, which is the market to crack. The success of Maslin in UK/E indicates the potential for a readable text with appropriate coverage.

By getting an author of Tye's standing - by common consent one of the best 3 or 4 philosophers of mind currently in their 'prime' - to write an accessible and authoritative book at the level of Churchland's classic "Matter and Consciousness", we have the chance to produce the leading text in the field, with serious US potential.