Jim’s work over the last few years has been truly formative for me philosophically and beyond. In the later stages of my own studies and research, I reached a point where philosophy of mind seemed hopeless. There seemed to be no way forward: at the end of every potential path resides miracles, magic or paradox. The Mind, it seemed, was incapable of explaining its own existence or provenance. It is the most perplexing phenomenon in the universe and also the only thing capable of *being perplexed*. For all its intellectual and reflective power, and all its impressive capacity to comprehend the “world out there”, that success does not transfer when it takes *itself* as the object of inquiry. Jim’s work lays the foundation for a new way forward. A way forward for philosophy that does not demand of the philosopher that she abandon the very intellectual virtues that make her a philosopher as such. This latest work acknowledges the difficulty of the philosophical quest explicitly. Even more, it takes that difficulty as a crucial clue and asks: what if our apparent inability to find the answer we’ve been looking is itself part of the answer? If you happen to be one of those entities walking around with a mind, you should use that mind to read this book

Mind, Matter & Nature remains my all-time favorite advanced introduction to the field!