Customer Reviews

The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this book, one of the world's most important and under-recognized philosophers addresses what is arguably the major cultural question of our times: Can the humanistic and even religious view of human nature be reconciled with science?

Flanagan is a witty, entertaining writer, who eschews the jargon and abstractions that deaden the prose of the vast majority of academic philosophers. And unlike philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Flanagan is less intent on demonstrating his cleverness than on presenting his thoughts as clearly as possible. Although he is steeped in knowledge-from Aristotle to the latest findings of cognitive science-Flanagan wears his learning lightly. His writings are rigorous enough for professionals-philosophers and scientists paid to ponder the mind-body problem and other enigmas-while remaining accessible for lay readers. And shouldn't philosophy be for everyone?

Flanagan is basically a scientific materialist, who believes that the mind is a function of the brain and cannot exist independently of it. In The Problem of the Soul, he dismisses such supernatural concepts as God, the immortal soul, life after death, and even free will, defined as freedom from physical causality. But he argues convincingly that if we jettison a supernatural outlook, we are left not with an anything-goes nihilism but with an even more secure foundation for morality.

Flanagan deftly draws upon his personal experience to explore certain questions-for example, what concept of a self makes sense, given all the changes we pass through in life? He reveals his family's history of alcoholism, his decision to stop drinking, his recent interest in Buddhism. In the hands of a lesser writer, this approach would seem self-indulgent, but Flanagan makes it poignant and compelling. There is a warmth suffusing his prose that counteracts the chill of his ideas, and even lends them a kind of tacit support: ultimately, it is simple human decency that will save us (if we can be saved) and not faith in some supernatural metaphysics.

A book like this is bound to provoke-indeed invites-objections, and I have a couple. One is that the free will Flanagan attacks-a dualistic version that assumes absolute freedom from physical causality--is something of a straw man. I believe that science undermines any meaningful concept of human choice, including the one that Flanagan articulates.

I also see a potential weakness in Flanagan's concept of an "ethical ecology." He suggests that, just as ecologists seek to understand the factors that contribute to a healthy ecosystem, so should our ethics aim at delineating conditions conducive to our "flourishing." The tenets of ecology-for example, the notion that diversity of species leads to ecological stability-are contentious, to say the least, and hence might not provide the kind of the secure foundation for human ethics that Flanagan envisions. But of course Flanagan wrote this book not to give us answers but to incite further reflection and dialogue. He succeeds splendidly. We need philosophers like him.

I was going to grad school in philosophy before I read this book--I think--but I was worried about whether or not I would ever get to work on the things that really matter. I'm not worried anymore. Although I am wondering if I'll have to do all the other work Flanagan has done before I get the nerve to publish anything. Cognitive neuroscience, psychology, literature (with minor side interests in sociology and religion)--it's a wonder that I can understand anything the man says. But I found this book to be one of the clearest, most enjoyable things I ever read.

The Problem of the Soul is an amazing synthesis in which ethics meets the scientifically savvy 21st century--it's the book Nietzsche would have written if he had been interested in being understood. No other single text has had such an impact on the way I think, and I am in awe of the man who can build so much of the argument from scratch while getting so much right. Flanagan does indeed have the hands of a surgeon: there's no flinching here, and it's a light touch the whole way through. Whatever pain might be involved in the excision is masked by this surgeon's crooked grin; good humor is a great palliative.

This book is for people who want to enjoy reading something that will challenge how they think. It's an amazing primer for academic philosophy (frightening how much I learned without even realizing it--I can't tell you how much I wish I'd read it before I took all those stupid courses), and it reads like a novel. I can honestly say that I've never before had the experience of having to make myself put down a philosophy text in order to get some work done. It was a beautiful thing.

Written for a general audience, The Problem of the Soul comes across as a late-night conversation with a really exciting person you just met at the local pub or coffeehouse. It's written with style and personality, and you truly feel as if you get to know this guy. Which turns out to be a good thing--he's a really great person.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm all for everything that Flanagan says. Actually, I'm the president of the group responsible for promoting interfaith dialogue on campus at Duke University, and I have something of a vested interest in refuting many of his arguments about matters of faith. I wish I could. I do believe there are some valid responses to most of the things he says, but I also believe that all those responses involve some serious re-evaluations. One thing I'm certain of is that all religious people have an undeniable obligation to read this book (to themselves, to their faiths). I applaud Flanagan for the effort he puts into opening up a genuine dialogue: he shows extreme sensitivity in treating people of faith as fellow creatures worthy of dignity and respect (even as he challenges the very beliefs that are generally thought to provide the foundation for that faith).

Reading this book refreshed my vision and rekindled my passion for philosophy. If I had to recommend just one philosophy book for each and every person to read, this would be it. Do yourself a favor and buy it. For those with slightly more specialized interests, you might want to check out Flanagan's other works. Varieties of Moral Personality and Dreaming Souls have become my new favorites; I'm going after the philosophy of mind stuff next. But none of them beats The Problem of the Soul, so make sure you get that one first.

I truly enjoyed this book. One can always find something to carp about in a philosophy text, but this book does an excellent job discussing a number of BIG questions - mind, free will, the self, ethics, the meaning of life. If you have read widely, you will have seen many of the arguments presented here, but Flanagan does a wonderful job of weaving them together. I especially enjoyed his approach to ethics as a normative science (!) describing human ecologies. Flanagan's exposition will almost certainly challenge some of your ideas, but the objective here is not to find some final set of answers, but rather, to refine our questions. In that, the author succeeds brilliantly.

I've done a bit of reading in contemporary phiosophy of mind (Churchland, Dennett, Fodor, Kim, Searle, Papineau, Stich, etc...), and I bought this book with high hopes. What I discovered was a wordy (and at times entirely superficial) introduction to a contemporary naturalistic (i.e., the natural, material world is all there is) approach to some of the core issues in analytic philosophy; namely, human agency, the nature of the mental life, personal identity, and the nature of morality. Flanagan's premise is that there is no good reason to believe in non-physical or supernatural entities like God, the soul, or the like, and science can (or will) inevitably give us as good an explanation of all aspects of reality as we're ever going to get. Strictly speaking, there is no "problem of the soul" because the soul doesn't exist. The remaining 'problem' for the naturalist, then, is to come up with an account of personal identity, human agency, moral responsibility, and the like in a way that is compatible with the modern, naturalistic view but accords with enough of our pre-philosophical intuitions about these topics to count as an adequate explanation thereof. This book represents Flanagan's attempt at solving the latter sort of problem.

So there's the summary. Now for my all-too-brief critique: to his credit, Flanagan states up-front and in no uncertain terms what his beliefs are. There is very little of what John Searle calls the "give it a name" view going on here. However, after reading The Problem of the Soul, I was left wondering whether Flanagan had taken the time to read anything published in the last 30 years by any theistic philosopher writing in analytic philosophy of religion (e.g., Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Keith Yandell, or Robert Adams, among others). Ditto with action theory, except drop the theistic part (Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Tim O'Connor, Stewart Goetz, Randolph Clarke...) Simply put, Flanagan nowhere interacts in any detail with arguments against his views, nor does he give much in the way of a detailed version of his own views. His treatment of the various topics mentioned in The Problem of the Soul repeatedly amounts to, "this is what people used to think about God, human freedom, etc. but here's the correct view about these things." I also thought it odd that he repeatedly mentioned (ridiculed, actually) a quote by Roderick Chisholm on libertarian freedom, but did not refer to, much less interact with, any of the libertarians mentioned above. Similarly, it is exceedingly difficult to discern what kind of compatibilist Flanagan is. If he is a causal theorist, he does not give us any explanation of how to handle causally deviant cases, our awareness of our actions as we act, and the like. Rather, Flanagan appears to assume that these things are not a problem, and thus continues on his merry way. However, given the frequency with which some of his other works are cited in various books and journal articles, I cannot bring myself to believe (no comments about doxastic voluntarism, please = P ) that he is unaware of these kinds of issues. Why then, does Flannagan not interact with them in his book? An odd phenomenon, to say the least.

The oddity is not limited to God and agency either- it continues throughout his discussion of the mind and morality as well. To cite one particularly egregious example of what I'm talking about, consider Flanagan's explanation of how physical structures like brains come to possess (or produce) certain qualitative feels. On page 87-88, (repeated again on page 224), he writes, "...it is easy to explain why certain brain events are uniquely experienced by you subjectively. Only you are properly hooked up to your own nervous system to have your own experiences." To anyone who's done even a modicum of reading about qualia and how difficult it is to explain in a materialist ontology, this "solution" seems at best disingenuous, if not an outright joke. The substance dualist, the property dualist, the functionalist, and the type-identity theorist can all say "amen" to Flanagan's statement here, even though their views are mutually exclusive! The crux of the matter is that Flanagan doesn't say what he means by 'you' here. That is, he does not say what, precisely, is the subject of the phenomenological experience. Is it a soul? Surely not, for Flanagan is a materialist! Is it a certain region of the brain? Is it a certain pattern of neural firings? Flanagan does not say. And why is it that certain neural stimulations (e.g., those that cause a tickle or a pain) feel like *that*? Why do certain neural stimulations feel like (or cause us to feel like) anything at all? Again, Flanagan remains silent.

In sum, The Problem of the Soul is of benefit to those who want a readable but superficial look at a dominant trend in modern analytic philosophy, and this is why it gets two stars instead of one. But for those who are already familiar with the issues, their money is better spent elsewhere. When it comes to a robust defense of physicalism (or even a serious dualism), as the saying goes, "the devil is in the details" and unfortunately, in this work Flanagan does not enlighten us as to what those details are.

In this book, philosopher Owen Flanagan argues that philosophically, introspectively and scientifically there is no soul or (uncaused) free will. They don't exist, and they don't make sense. If you think they do, you're not what you think you are.

Second, and more importantly, that's ok. Naturalism's version of the self and agency are enough for a fulfilling worldview. He throws on an argument about ethics, but it's really an afterthought, kind of an appendix to his work on the self and agency.

If you are looking for an argument about religion, this isn't it. His purpose is not to satisfy the religiously devoted that they can give up their faith, but the folks who are hesitant to give up "the soul" or "free will."

Flanagan doesn't take any theistic position very seriously. He's not interested in refuting theism except when he "has to" to get on with his real interests. "There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical warrant."

If you want to argue that point, you want a book defending scientific naturalism against theistic critics (actually, usually the relationship is reversed these days), and you'll have to look elsewhere. This just isn't it and you'll be disappointed. Try, I don't know, perhaps Richard Dawkins, or Victor Stenger.

And he isn't even interested in "qualia," although in his bibliography he admits that it's the "sexiest" topic in philosophy of mind. But I personally think that there's nothing there to get excited about. So I didn't mind the omission.

But if you want a book on qualia look elsewhere. (Try Dennett.) This just isn't it and you'll be disappointed.

He is really only interested in whether a naturalist account of the self and agency will allow us to conceive of ourselves as having meaningful lives. I am in basic agreement with him, so I won't criticize his answer.

Among his critics here on Amazon, the popular science journalist John Horgan disagrees with Flanagan in his review without giving any reason; Horgan thinks science leaves no room for meaningful human choice. A strong, extreme position; no doubt it would be a long discussion. Folks who take Horgan's position have a lot to prove. Even Daniel Dennet, not one to shy away from "uncomfortable" aspects of scientific materialism, basically agrees with Flanagan.

Actually, I think Horgan just missed the point of the chapters on selfhood. Otherwise, he'd probably phrase his objection differently.

Anyway, ethics as ecology is not to be taken too literally, it's more of a suggestion than a philosophical system, and Flanagan doesn't take it very far. If you want a deep look at ethics from a naturalist perspective, look elsewhere. Flanagan recommends Allan Gibbard or Simon Blackburn; others might recommend Mackie.

One critic was misled by Flanagan's use of the word "humanist." He doesn't mean secular humanism, he means the classical tradition of thought from ancient times through Descartes and right up until scientific materialism. It must have been a very confusing book for that guy. Someone might be confused by Flanagan's use of "libertarian" as well, which has nothing to do with politics.

Motsinger's impatient review brought out a couple of relevant points, such as whether Flanagan did a "bait and switch."

Actually, maybe so, but not in the chapters Motsinger obsesses over--rather, in the chapters on "self." Flanagan redefines "self" so that our "selves" have (some) meaningful power of choice. He spends two chapters on that project because it is the real key to his argument: once self is re-defined along Flanagan's lines, everything else follows naturally.

Flanagan himself says, "My proposal is this: Change the subject. Stop talking about free will and determinism and talk instead about whether and how we can make sense [in a worldview of scientific naturalism] of the concepts of 'deliberation,' 'choice,' 'reasoning,' 'agency,' and 'accountability.'"

What he does is change the "self" under discussion to make sense of those topics. He succeeds.

Well, and that's the key point. You're not what you think you are, but it's ok. You can go on with your life. You still have all the ethical equipment you need and want. He'll show you why, if you want to know. I think he's right, I think most of his discussion is relevant and reasonable: 5 stars.

Some reading I'd recommend before hitting Flanagan is Steven Pinker, especially "How the Mind Works." Perhaps one of Damasio's books would be ok, but I prefer Pinker. In fact, if you're not a little familiar with social psychology and cognitive science, I doubt you'll appreciate this book.

(There's the touche for the pure philosophers out there: this is a book about the real world.)

Here it is; another book about the soul. Do I sound enthusiastic? I wish I could be. I like Owen Flanagan a lot; "Consciousness reconsidered" and "Self-Expressions" are masterworks in the philosophy of mind and ethics. This book, despite being well written and more thought-stirring than most... well... it's simply another book trying to get rid of the soul. So as not to beat around any philosophical bush, it suceeds if you don't believe in a soul, it fails if you do.

First, Flanagan's perspective is probably a bit different than most; he is a buddhist with some fairly unconventional - albeit penetrating - insights. For instance, he has no use for the concept of unified consciousness (or the feeling that your consciousness is a distinct 'entity-like' thing). Rather, upon introspection, we (or, he) notice(s) that it feels more like a stream of seperate thought-trains that occasionally coverge (generally, when we are paying attention to something).

Similarly, Flanagan revives the often overlooked (suprisingly) concept of the stream of consiousness. The mind doesn't start and stop as many philosophers of mind lose track of. Rather, it continues when we are not at all paying attention and is quite random at these times. The long and short of this is that Flanagan starts his book with introspection on how the mind is, not how (like Dennett does) he'd like it to be. It is messy, larger than life, confusing and contradictory at times, but any workable philosophy of mind must start with as true a reflection as possible.

From here, we go down hill. Flanagan spends an unnecessary large chapter protesting that the battle between free will and determinism doesn't exist; in its place is a great mixture of both. He tells it to us like we've not heard it before and despite my efforts to do otherwise, I couldn't make beleive that this was at all new to me or anyone else.

The last few chapters see Flanagan coming back to his attempt to sketch out a naturalized concept of the human being without a 'soul' and the last chapter tries to construct a viable ethic from this 'new found' human ecology. I for one, share his distaste for soul and soul-like speculation. Still, I can't shake the feeling (and I'm sure you won't be able to either) that we've read too many of these arguments before.

Philosophy was once concerned with wisdom, the big picture. What is a person? How shall I live? Why be moral? Analyltic philosophy in the 20th century treated these questions as largely untractable, leaving the impression that they were not worth asking. Owen Flanagan is one brave soul willing to take on the big picture. Framing his project in terms of the conflict between the manifest or humanistic image and the scientific images (Wilfred Sellars), Flanagan -- with appointments at Duke in philosophy, neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology and brain science tries -- and, even more remarkably, succeeds -- in providing a compelling and uplifting philosophy of persons that takes seriously our nature as gregarious social animals that evolved according to darwinian principles. We are selfish and benevolent animals with big brains. We can puff up our image with all manner of supernatural and mysterious stories and props. God created us in his image with prospects to sit for all eternity at his right hand. We are spiritual beings possessed of a faculty of free will. Flanagan explains why all this might seem consoling and uplifting but isn't. Quine proposed that good philosophy is continuous with science. Flanagan shows that this is so. This is the book -- the only book -- to relentlessly show by careful and sustained argument how mind, morals, and the meaning of life are preserved even though we are animals and the mind is the brain. The most important philosophy book is a very long time.

I won't waste too much time echoing what many other reviewers have said. This book is a rarity in philosophy in that there is nothing very abstract. Owen takes a deliberate, logical approach to his subject that makes the book easy to read and understand. One thing I think people should understand before reading is that Flanagan sets out with a purpose in mind. His scientific and logical approach can at times lead the reader to think of the book as a truly scientific inquiry, and much of it is, but Flanagan stretches his theories at times in order to pull everything together at the end.
One specific point: Flanagan calls himself a neo compatibalist, and he chastizes traditional compatibalist for essentially "changing the subject," meaning that their version of free will is different than what we normally think of as free will. I would challange Flanagan that his neo compatibalism is essentially doing the same thing to moral responsibility. Although I do think that a form of moral responsibility can fit within his naturalistic view, we cannot decieve ourselves into thinking that nothing is lost from our traditional conceptions of moral responsibility.

In The Problem of the Soul (2002), Owen Flanagan sets up a contrast between the perennial philosophy (or humanism) and scientific naturalism. He takes scientific naturalism to be the correct method for pursuing knowledge. He lays out this contrast in a manner that presupposes the reader has at least a basic grasp of Western philosophy. He combines sound scholarship with entertaining and sometimes personal writing styles.

Flanagan makes the traditional case against believing things without a rational warrant in his critique of religion and immorality of the soul. He argues that the persistent belief in the manifest (common) image of being in the world includes the residue of some theistic baggage, in particular, freedom of the will, conscious experience, and selfhood. The task is then how to accommodate these notions in a scientific naturalism. I will focus on just two of these for the purpose of a brief review.

The conceptual gap in consciousness studies is the problem of relating phenomenal experience (the way things feel from a first person perspective) to physical processes in the brain. For Flanagan, the challenge is to accommodate, not eliminate, subjectivity and phenomenality within scientific naturalism. Flanagan argues that a first person perspective does not entail another sort of being (e.g., spirit or mind) or any qualitative difference within being; the being of physical objects is sufficient to explain everything there is. Although Flanagan admits that mental events cannot be completely described from third person perspective, he argues that the qualitative feel of experiences is still identical to neural events:

"The nature of conscious mental events is such that despite being perfectly natural, objective states of affairs, they have as part of their essential nature their subjective feel" (89).

So the objective state of affairs (physical processes in the brain) appears to have ontological priority, since it is what produces or realizes the phenomenal experience. The subjective feel emerges somehow as part of the essential nature of certain objective states of affairs. This view is similar to John Searle's view that mental states are emergent (macro) properties of physical states of the brain (micro properties). Both views try to accommodate the subjective interiority of human reality by making it a property of the physical. But these reductionist views do not explain the qualitative differences between mental contents and physical objects located in space. How do we get from the neurons firing away to the feeling of sadness or the qualia of colors? There is still an epistemological gap between the first person description and the alleged objective process that is supposed to underwrite that description.

With regard to a critique of Cartesian freedom, Flanagan argues that what motivates a belief in free will is generally a theological commitment that sees God as holding humans accountable for what they do on earth.

"It is unimaginable to me, despite the power of the phenomenological feeling that we are agents who control what we do, that anything as strong as a conception of ourselves as finite unmoved movers would have been added to our manifest image unless we had first conceived of God and his will along these lines, and then added the view that he holds people fully accountable for what they do" (107).

So if we liberate ourselves from this theism, we should let go of this "incredible, incoherent" idea and conceive of human freedom in terms of voluntary behaviors that obey the laws of nature. Flanagan's neo-compatibilist (actions can be caused, yet voluntary) position is that voluntary action "involves the agent knowing what action she is performing and acting from reasons and desires that are her own" (113). Notice the use of the term "from." It seems to imply that reasons and desires determine me to act the way I do. Indeed, Flanagan refers to what he takes to be the standard assumption in philosophy of mind that "reasons can be causes." If I do not decide about which reasons to employ, this raises a question about just how "voluntary" voluntary actions are.

Why can't an agent choose the reasons and desires in accordance with which she will act? What is it that prevents her action from being free in the Cartesian sense of being self-caused? Flanagan stacks the deck in favor of determinism by equating deliberation and will with brain processes. Since brain processes ultimately obey chemical and physical laws, and willing, for Flanagan, is already presupposed as a brain process, willing must obey physical laws. He also employs an epistemic argument based on the limitations of our self knowledge. When I choose, I am not aware of "what causes me to deliberate and weight my options the as I do" (114). So my feeling of autonomy when I deliberate is illusory.

In the picture of the natural mind drawn by Flanagan, life experiences and genes "feed into a brain" in such a way as to form habits and virtues over time. When confronted with a morally charged situation, conscious deliberation is determined by these habits and virtues to arrive at a decision. These determining factors are not chosen by the individual. Such a claim, for Flanagan, would be "certainly false." These virtues come from a combination of biologically evolved dispositions, moral education, and cultural norms. In so far as we can be said to assent to a new norm, that assent is determined by some pre-existing disposition (reasons, desires, habits, virtues, genetic traits). On Flanagan's view, conscious deliberation is entirely parasitic on what has been established at the level of habit and virtue. In this picture, agency never transcends its past in relation to the given opportunity to decide.

There is something wrong with this model. While it is true that I cannot be aware of all of my mental processes, I can be aware of the relevant ones when faced with a moral decision. The question is whether the habits, virtues, reasons and desires I have had in the past must now determine my decision. I believe the answer is no. It simply is not necessary that I follow my instincts, habits, virtues, desires, and usual reasons. Within the constraints of my abilities and situation, I choose not only my behavior, but the values in accordance with which I will act. I can break with my former habits, even if they go against deeply ingrained feelings and beliefs.

Flanagan has loosened the grip of the perennial philosophy, only to fall into the grip of an all too dogmatic naturalism and computationalism. His complex naturalist model of deliberation has the key moves involved in deliberation happen automatically, like an information processor. Flanagan's example of voluntary action is instructive so I will quote the main scenario in full.

"Suppose a high school student has been accepted to Duke, the Harvard of the South, and Harvard, the Harvard of the North, and that she is having real trouble deciding which to choose. She can't seem to break the mental tie. Suppose we survey the state of her brain as she deliberates and we see two cell assemblies, one fighting for the Harvard of the South and one for the Harvard of the North, that are of exactly equal strength. We know she must eventually choose. If you believe in strict causal determinism you think something will eventually happen that will tip the balance, and whatever that is will itself have a set of sufficient causes that made it happen" (121).

This example is instructive. Since Flanagan has rejected the Cartesian notion of a free will, his voluntary agent cannot simply make herself the person who will go to one or the other universities. In Flanagan's world, since she has no reason to choose one university over the other, she needs a push from some cause external to her freedom. This, according to Flanagan, can come in the form of some accident, like the sun shining through the window to tip the balance in favor of Duke, which has warmer weather, or a newspaper article open on the table that suggests George W. Bush went to Harvard Business School. Either way, a new reason can then tip the balance.

The other alternative is that some indeterminate state of certain neurons in her brain tips the balance. With regard to indeterminacy at the level of neurons, I have not seen any good arguments as to how, at the level of human deliberation, this could make a difference. So let us focus on the new information scenario. Notice that the way we interpret her response to the new information should be no different from the way we interpret how the tie came to be in the first place. If the tie came about through strict determinism, so too does the tie breaker. However, if she chose to value certain features of each college and was not simply determined by predispositions, then both the tie and any new information would be subject to the same freedom.

Flanagan project of dismantling the perennial philosophy of the soul arguably goes a bit too far in the direction of naturalism. If Cartesian freedom is to be refuted, it must be done on its own merits and not as the residue of theism. Before dismissing free will out of hand, one should consider its most challenging development in Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This developed concept of radical freedom is worthy of consideration before one falls into the grip of naturalism.

Flanagan's book is a good read and is both well researched and stimulating. His section on ecological ethics provides good arguments for an empirically based morality. But again, one leaves the text a bit uneasy about his account of phenomenal experience and free will.

For those interested in Flannagan's views on the conceptual gap in consciousness studies, Consciousness Reconsidered is a better read. There Flannagan critiques the mystereans (McGinn, Nagel) and offers a more detailed naturalistic interpretation of consciousness as an emergent property of physical events in the brain.

This is an amazing and important book on the nature of persons. Flanagan is a major contributor to the attempt to tame consciousness within a naturalistic theory (see his Consciousness Reconsidered, Dreaming Souls: Sleep Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind, and Self-Expressions: Mind, Morals and the Meaning of Life). In The Problem of the Soul he takes on an even bigger and more important problem. How are we to understand human nature -- free will, the self, morals and life's meaning -- if we take seriously the combined insights of Darwinian theory and work in cognitive science, neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience? Flanagan explores the issues with great sensitivity, compassion and depth. Our humanistic image does take a hit for there is no such thing as an immortal soul, we are animals through and through. But we are still persons and persons (often) act freely -- but not with mysterious free wills. Consciousness is not epiphenomenal. Life has meaning and morality has an important function -- it makes social coordination possible and positions us to flourish. Flanagan treats theists and soulophiles with the respect they deserve, but which their ideas don't (as he puts it). Many readers of Crick and Dennett find the main message of philosophical naturalism depressing and dehumanizing. Flanagan -- more than either of these -- is concerned with providing a full theory of person's compatible with what science teaches. But thanks to his humane and respectful tone, the subtlety of his arguments and conclusions, we are left with a picture of ourselves as remarkably gifted animals suited to find meaning in living knowledgeably, honestly, and with love and compassion. Wilfred Sellars, one of Flanagan's heroes saw philosophy as the attempt to understand how 'things considered in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.' This is a book of wisdom in the old sense. A philosophy of persons for the 21st century. Must reading for anyone who wonders: What am I? What does life mean?