REVIEW SYMPOSIUM GAUGE PRESSURE Richard Healey, Gauging What’s Real: The Conceptual Founda- tions of Contemporary Gauge Theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 297. $99.00 HB. By Dean Rickles Howard Stein once proclaimed that the ‘‘the quantum theory of fields is the contemporary locus of metaphysical research’’ (1970, p. 285): surely wishful thinking at the time? It certainly has more than a modicum of the normative about it: Stein was making the general point that our ideas of the structure and nature of reality ought to march alongside our best physical theories. Philosophers were rather slow to take note, vis-a `-vis quantum field theory, but Stein’s message seems to have since been taken on board, with sev- eral fine monographs and collections, and many articles and theses, on philosophical aspects of quantum field theory appearing since then. Local quantum field theory still provides the framework for our best theory of the elementary structure of matter and its various fundamental interactions: the Standard Model (though, alas, gravi- tational interactions are not yet covered in this description, and it is doubtful that they ever will be without some fundamental revisions). However, the sub-theories that describe the subatomic world – the Standard Model really being a number of theories (of the strong and electroweak interactions) stitched together in a somewhat ad hoc fashion – are highly constrained by their symmetries: they are examples of quantum gauge field theories. The addition of Ôgauge’ elements to a quantum field theory adds a whole new bundle (par- don the pun) of interpretive headaches, quite unlike anything one finds in quantum field theory per se (or in standard classical field theory, for that matter). General relativity too can be described in the framework of gauge theory, albeit classical gauge field theory. Metascience (2009) 18:5–41 Ó Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s11016-009-9241-6