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LESLIE, John. Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. x + 234 pp. Cloth, $35.00-In this book John Leslie presents Spinozistic pantheism in contemporary dress and argues for its compatibility with what we already know and believe. Building on his earlier work, Leslie now suggests that there may be infinitely many infinite minds each worth calling divine. The reader is invited to contemplate a universe (or infinitely many universes) along lines that fit a contemporary Spinozism, even if one begins with the suspicion that pantheism is bizarre or absurd (pp. 6, 7).
The book is organized into six chapters. The first two aim to elucidate the infinite thinking which takes place in a divine mind. The universe does not exist outside the divine mind but rather inside it, since "its thinking about our universe is what our universe is" (p. 8). The divine mind must have an immensely complex structure comparable to the complexity of the world; yet it need not know everything since not everything is worth knowing (for example, disorderly universes). The divine mind would know human thoughts exactly as we know them (p. 101), from which it follows that there would be divine ignorance as well. While reserving a distinct region...