Over the past two and a half decades, David Chalmers has established himself not only as one of the leading figures in Anglophone philosophy of mind, but also as the theorist who has done the most to bring the discipline into the public sphere without a disastrous sacrifice of content. Other specialists before him — Daniel Dennett most notably — have attempted to write for an educated readership broader than the close company of their academic peers; but few have succeeded as well as Chalmers at doing so without either terribly oversimplifying the issues under discussion or lapsing into obscurity at certain predictable junctures. Moreover, he writes, to all appearances at least, with an engagingly open mind on most of the topics he addresses, even where his own convictions prove quite firm and precise, rather than with, say, the sort of fideistic belligerence that certain militant materialists in the field sometimes tend to substitute for solvent argument (I shall name no names, not even Dennett’s).
