Ross’s Thought and World

For readers interested in a detailed and rigorous contemporary defense of Aristotelian metaphysics written from a point of view informed by analytic philosophy, I have several times recommended David Oderberg’s excellent Real Essentialism. I am pleased to be able now to recommend another book as well, namely James Ross’s recent Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities. Ross’s 1992 Journal of Philosophy article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought” is in my view one of the most important papers ever written in 20th century philosophy of mind, and gets to the heart of why a naturalistic account of the mind is in principle impossible in a way other recent critics of materialism have not. Ross’s article “The Fate of the Analysts: Aristotle’s Revenge” is also important. The themes of both articles are developed at length in the new book (and the “Immaterial Aspects” paper more or less appears as chapter 6). As Bill Vallicella has said, Ross “is not easy to read, in part due to the difficulty of the matters he discusses and in part due to his own intricate and idiosyncratic mode of expression; but he is worth the effort.”