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The Mind's Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action . By Matthew Soteriou . Oxford : Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 400, £55. ISBN: 978-0-19-967845-7
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Matthew Soteriou's The Mind's Construction (2013) is an ambitious, brilliant, and complex book, absolutely packed with argument and interest. His general strategy is to explore the connections between fundamental metaphysical issues concerning the ontological categories of various mental phenomena and a number of specific issues that arise in philosophy of mind but are normally discussed independently of such metaphysical concerns. He applies this strategy in great depth and detail to issues concerning both sensory consciousness and conscious cognition: the sensuous nature of perceptual experience; bodily sensation; representational versus relational accounts of perception; the experience of time and change; the characteristics of individual sensory modalities; the structure of spatial and temporal perception; perceptual imagination and recollection; introspection; mental action; conscious thinking and judgement; critical reflection and autonomy; practical self-knowledge; and belief.
The central idea is to provide an ontology that fits the phenomenology of consciousness and cognition in all of these areas in such a way that substantive progress is possible towards the solution of persistent philosophical problems concerning specific acts of consciousness and cognition. A unifying key to Soteriou's positive picture is the importance in all of these areas of the ontological category of ' occurrent mental state': a state of mind that is constitutively dependent upon and sustained by conscious mental occurrences (events and processes of various kinds). A state of the relevant kind cannot obtain without the occurrence of such conscious phenomenal events and processes. In many of the problem cases that he is concerned with, these sustaining occurrences are also in turn constitutively dependent upon the occurrent states in question. Events and processes of those kinds cannot occur without the obtaining of the relevant kinds of states.
Soteriou calls this the Interdependence Thesis: 'The occurrence and state in question have an interdependent status, in so far as the nature of the occurrence is to be specified, at least in part, in terms of the kind of state that obtains when it occurs, and the nature of the state is to be specified, at least in part, in...