Constructing the World

David Chalmers is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and Professor of Philosophy at New York University. After studying mathematics at Adelaide and Oxford, he completed a PhD in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University in 1993. His 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was highly successful with both popular and academic audiences. As director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona from 1999 to 2004, and as a founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, he has played a major role in developing the interdisciplinary science of consciousness. He is well known for his formulation of the 'hard problem' of consciousness and his arguments against materialism. He has also written on topics as diverse as the nature of meaning, the foundations of artificial intelligence, and philosophical issues in The Matrix.

• Acknowledgments ; Introduction ; How to Read this Book ; 1. Scrutability and the Aufbau ; 2. Varieties of Scrutability ; 3. Adventures with a Cosmoscope ; 4. The Case for A Priori Scrutability ; 5. Revisability and Conceptual Change ; 6. Hard Cases ; 7. Minimizing the Base ; 8. The Structure of the World ; Glossary ; Bibliography ; Index

Constructing the World is a work of major philosophical importance that will be of interest to philosophers of just about every stripe. It is extremely ambitious. And yet even with all the territory it ranges over, the argumentation is consistently careful and rigorous.