epistemic role. Accordingly, she address the possibility that its politics will stall science or close useful avenues of research (Epistemological Challenge), that its politics will degenerate into those of repressive or totalitarian regimes (Historical Challenge), that interference will disturb the natural progression or benefits of science (Sociological and Economic Challenges) or that interference will impede scientists from expressing themselves (Political Challenge). She answers these objections largely by presenting them as perversions or misunderstandings of the SRS proposal. But I think Kourany may have missed why one might raise some of these challenges. In particular, I think one would present the 'Historical Challenge' not to suggest that science could degenerate into a Soviet-style nightmare, but rather to address how even "public" institutions can pervert well-meaning feminist values. Kourany does not do enough to address the form that public involvement will take. She does, though, provide a few helpful first steps in Chapter 5. Her advocacy of more explicit, feminist-inspired ethical codes is an admirable start. Kourany effectively introduces her SRS program in this book through rich historical and contemporary examples. It is a compelling program, building upon decades of contributions from feminist philosophers of science. Her program would benefit from additional consideration of feminist analyses of the complicity of public institutions with marginalising public norms, analyses that invite important reservations and rejoinders to her advocacy of public involvement. She is able to cover a great deal of territory in this book and has delivered work that should be of great interest to feminist philosophers of science, historians of analytic philosophy, the science studies community, and scientists themselves. MATTHEW DRABEKUniversity of Iowa Nature, Reason, & the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings. BY ROGER TEICHMANN. (Oxford UP, 2011). Pp. Xvi+192. Price £35.00.) Teichmann's book is a contemplative study of issues in ethics and language, in two senses. First, it is characteristic of the style of the book, which is as much ruminative as argumentative. Second, a consistent theme in the book is the significance of what Teichmann takes Aristotle to be after in advocating a life of contemplation as our highest end. Early on Teichmann reminds us of Wittgenstein's references to 'pictures' or 'ways of seeing' things that frame the questions we ask and determine what will count as adequate answers (§1.ix). Teichmann can be seen as exploring one such picture, in which questions about human nature, human lives, reasons, and language interact in ways that are mutually illuminating. This picture is not perhaps in the mainstream of contemporary moral philosophy, but Teichmann's development of it is insightful and provocative. It emerges through broad discussions in five chapters. Chapter 1 is on 'Reasons and Reactions;' here Teichmann introduces the picture metaphor, as a way of explaining why we see some things ('this is a human BOOK REVIEWS 633 © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly being') as reason-giving in ways other things ('this is a chimp') are not. The explanation for this difference lies in a deep anthropocentrism that, Teichmann argues, in a sense is inevitable, since our practices (or 'language-games') of asking for and giving reasons are situated within linguistic patterns we learn from our conspecifics in beginning to think and understand the world in the first place. Teichmann draws on both Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian sources to make a powerful case that our reactions to the world - including our linguistic reactions - do not come as one-off items of experience or behavior; they come as packages or 'syndromes,' and these broader patterns provide the context for our understanding not only of reasons, but of behavior, emotions, and desires. Chapter 2, 'Human Agency,' adds themes from Anscombe to make a case that we make sense of our action and end-seeking in terms of the 'desirability characteristics' of the objects of our attitudes. On the one hand, this means that, pace Hume and others, our desires and passions are not above rational criticism, and on the other, it suggests that the meaning in what we do must come from a broad conception of human nature to ground that desirability, together with the results of something like Aristotelian 'contemplation,' which Teichmann takes to be Aristotle's settled view of the object of human agency (our final or ultimate end). In Chapter 3, 'Pleasure and Pain,' Teichmann extends the theme to propose that pleasure and pain are not best understood as mere inner states or episodes, but instead must be situated within a broader understanding of what makes a human life a good one (the subject of Chapter 4). Once again he makes a plausible case that the canons for the intelligibility of claims about what we find pleasant are public and part of the language-game of asking for and giving reasons. The conception of the good life developed in Chapter 4 is, unsurprisingly, generally an Aristotelian conception of flourishing in which virtue plays a prominent role. Teichmann points out, however, the corrective nature of many of the virtues, and considers the degree to which our thinking about good lives is balanced between our need for agency and our need for rest. Can we think of human progress through history? If so, is that a matter of eliminating evils? If so, what does that do for our thinking about corrective agency and its balance with rest? Chapter 5, 'Philosophy,' pulls together the threads in the previous chapters as part of an integrated and whole picture of ethics for human beings. The keynote question here is what philosophy has to do with life, and after granting that there are lots of conceptions of philosophy on which the answer is 'very little,' Teichmann finds a positive answer in thinking philosophically, which he assimilates (roughly) to contemplation, as Aristotle might have suggested. This allows for a project of seeking (and finding) the significance of small things (e.g., particular linguistic expressions, such as Moore's 'I have two hands') in larger patterns (e.g., the larger linguistic and anthropocentric contexts in which these items occur). Teichmann's picture is developed with considerable skill, wisdom, and insight, but in the end it is unlikely to persuade those not sympathetic at the outset. Those who tend to a broadly Aristotelian, Wittgensteinian, Anscombeian way of seeing things will find their thinking enriched at many points. However, Teichmann does less than one might like in engaging contrasting pictures. Against 634 BOOK REVIEWS © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly hedonism, for example, he argues that pleasure cannot be invariably good for human beings, because we can take pleasure in bad things (p. 103). Thoughtful hedonists are unlikely to be moved simply by the insistence that this is so. Teichmann's engagements with 'Utilitarianism' and 'classical liberalism,' both of which are represented in Mill (§2.vi), suffer from a similar deficiency. Teichmann's opponent here is a caricature of the real Mill, one who seems not have taken seriously 'the possibility that human beings might desire rotten and despicable things,' and thus whose Harm Principle requires restriction to application to only 'good and sane' desires (p. 83). Such a bowdlerisation of Mill's view seems utterly to fail to engage with the thoughtful substance of Mill's arguments, even if one does not endorse in the end either his Utilitarianism or his version of classical liberalism. Moreover, any version of liberalism which endorses the idea attributed to it by Teichmann, that 'representative democracy justifies itself by the theory that the People's will is necessarily for the best' (p. 85) would be innocent of the thoughtful liberal democratic theorising that has occurred in the last three centuries. Skeptics about Teichmann's picture who endorse these outlooks will find little engagement with their views. Early on, Teichmann contrasts a favored sort of animal embeddedness of our rationality with more abstract conceptions, and chooses for his target John McDowell's 'second naturalism' (p. xi). McDowell's thought experiment involving a wolf who learns to talk generates for McDowell a form of skepticism about values that Teichmann finds 'unreasonable, even irrational' (p. xii). Given McDowell's appreciation for the sort of project Teichmann is engaged in, one might hope for a closer engagement with his ideas and a comparison of ways of thinking about the way our 'second nature' emerges from our first. But that is the last we hear of McDowell in the book. On this score, as others, it leaves one wanting more. MARK LEBAROhio University The Opacity of Mind: An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge. BY PETER CARRUTHERS. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. 456. Price £30.00.) In this terrific book, Peter Carruthers aims to show that current theories of our knowledge of our own mental states don't sit at all well with our best theories of how the mind works. Carruthers also proposes and defends a radical alternative theory, which he succeeds in lending an impressive degree of support with appeal to both philosophical argumentation and a wealth of considerations drawn from recent work in cognitive science and related areas. In doing so, he offers a model of how an enduring and central philosophical issue can be fruitfully engaged in an empirically-informed manner. Philosophers of mind and epistemologists continue to be fascinated by our knowledge of our own mental lives; such readers will be fascinated by Carruthers's book, whether or not they agree with its deeply revisionary conclusions. BOOK REVIEWS 635 © 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly Copyright of Philosophical Quarterly is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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