Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Consciousness & Self-Consciousness Series)

Although the methodological approaches that the volume brings together are widely various, its contributors have evidently learned a good deal from one another, and the result displays much more coherence than one might have expected from a book in which philosophy of various sorts shares space with primatology and with discussions of autism. This impressive coherence is heartening to the reader who has entertained fears about philosophy's ability to stay relevant when faced with psychology's unabating torrent of freshly gathered data. The volume provides every reason to suppose that joint attention is a topic on which philosophy and other disciplines can collaborate fruitfully. (Christopher Mole, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

The book's one paper with interdisciplinary authorship is a clear highlight ― a provocative and sophisticated discussion of joint reminiscing by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack, both of whom are among the book's editors. Interdisciplinary work is rarely so well accomplished as theirs . . . neither the contributions individually, nor the book as a whole, depends on their interdisciplinarity for their interest. The philosophical reader will, in fact, find much to be interested by at those points where the various disciplines don't naturally converge. . . . Eilan and the editors with whom she has collaborated on this volume have achieved a work that advances our understanding of joint attention and of the several important phenomena in which it has a role. (Christopher Mole, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)