1 Review of David J. Chalmers’ Constructing the World (OUP 2012) Thomas W. Polger, University of Cincinnati 1. Introduction David Chalmers burst onto the philosophical scene in the mid-1990s with his work on consciousness. Chalmers awakened slumbering zombie arguments against physicalism, and transformed the explanatory gap into the Hard Problem of consciousness. Chalmers’ Hard Problem resonated with many researchers and students in those heady days of the Consciousness Wars. His distinction between Hard and Easy problems of consciousness became a central dogma of the movement. Chalmers’ influence in philosophy and consciousness studies is unquestionable. But enthusiasts of Chalmers’ framework for thinking about consciousness may be excused for not fully appreciating Chalmers’ own justification for drawing the Hard/Easy distinction, or even exactly which distinction he is drawing. Those nuances were absent or downplayed in the early Journal of Consciousness Studies and Scientific American articles. And even in his landmark The Conscious Mind the reader was invited to skip those early chapters and go directly to the zombie arguments. 1 Consequently it is not clear that “Chalmers’ Hard Problem” that has been widely influential is in fact Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of consciousness. For it is doubtful that many advocates have ever come to grips with the full story, and it turns out that the full story is very important. Chalmers’ approach involves a great deal of nuanced epistemology, among other things: a methodological view about how philosophy—metaphysics, especially—ought to be 1 ｗThere are a few sections that are philosophically technical. These are marked with an asterisk (*) and readers should feel free to skip themｘ (Chalmers 1996: xvi).