The essays collected in this volume were written over a period of two decades. They deal with a wide range of subjects and were intended for a variety of audiences. Despite the variety, there are certain unifying principles that underlie this collection; indeed, I have tried to make a selection that will exhibit a natural progression, as the topics move from consciousness to intentionality to society to language, and finally conclude with several debates about the issues that have preceded. In this introduction I want to try to state some of these unifying principles and offer a brief description (and note I say “description” rather than “summary” or “abstract”) of the essays.

There is a single overarching problem that has preoccupied me since I first began work in philosophy almost a half-century ago: How can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world?Howcan we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, speechact performing, rational agents in a world that we believe consists entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? How, in short, can we make our conception of ourselves fully consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and biology? The questions that have most preoccupied me – What is a speech act? What is consciousness? What is intentionality? What is society? What is rationality? – have all in one way or another been addressed to this larger problematic.