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Some of the best philosophy is done when someone with the patience, understanding and technical ability to do so, focuses on issues of detail in an area, while maintaining the breadth of vision to zoom out again, once the detailed work is done, to explain its momentous consequences for larger questions. Matthew Soteriou has these abilities in spades, and The Mind’s Construction is a marvellous example of how the trick should be turned. The book is essentially a fairly comprehensive, ontologically-focused treatment of most of the central areas of philosophy of mind, and is organized into two parts. The first deals with sensory consciousness, and includes discussions of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, imagination and perceptual recollection. The second half deals with the sorts of conscious cognitive activity that conscious subjects can engage in — for example, conscious calculation, deliberation, suppositional reasoning and self-critical reflection. The main aim of the first part, on which I shall focus here, is to show that work in the ontology of mind that focuses on what Soteriou calls ‘distinctions of temporal character’ — essentially, differences such as those between things which go on through time, or occur at times, or endure through time, etc. — can shed a great deal of light upon the phenomenology of perception and consciousness. The ambition of the second part is to apply these ontological considerations also to the topic of various sorts of conscious thinking.

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