Peter Carruthers, Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 256 pp, $45.00, ISBN 0-19927-736-2 Manuel Bremer Published online: 8 July 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Consciousness collects Carruthers’ essays on the topic from the last ten years. Some of the essays have been revised, so the book may set out Carruthers’ current position on consciousness, presenting his dispositionalist higher-order theory of conscious- ness. Although there is some repetition, given that the original essays sometimes follow a similar line of argument, the book presents a more or less concise introduction to one of the main theories currently discussed. The book can be divided into three parts. The first part deals with phenomenal consciousness and the advantages of a dispositionalist theory of (phenomenal) consciousness in distinction to first order or second order actualist theories. The second part takes up Carruthers’ work on the relation of language and thought. The third part takes up Carruthers’ work on animal consciousness and the ethics of animal treatment. Carruthers’ work is known for some highly controversial theses. In his earlier book The Animals Issue (1992) he claimed that ‘‘human beings are unique amongst members of the animal kingdom in possessing conscious mental states’’ (p. 186). Given a common understanding of ‘‘conscious’’ this sounds like the outrageous remark that there is nothing—not even blackness, so to say—going on in even highly developed animals like mammals. Everything depends on the employed definition of (phenomenal) consciousness here. Carruthers himself is partly to blame for such misunderstandings, but in Consciousness he gives a more precise statement of this definition or understanding of the terms. Interestingly his definition of consciousness, tying it to the human case interwoven with self-awareness, resembles the understanding of consciousness in the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenal consciousness, according to Carruthers, consists of a dual analog content (the first order perceptual content red plus the higher-order analog presentation seeming red of the occurrence of the first order state itself). Thus there are phenomenal M. Bremer (&) Philosophisches Institut, Universita ¨t Du ¨sseldorf, Universita ¨tsstraße 1, 40225 Dusseldorf, Germany e-mail: bremer@mbph.de 123 Minds & Machines (2008) 18:409–411 DOI 10.1007/s11023-008-9107-5