Abstract

Tamar Gendler's Thought Experiment is a book that comes out of her doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, and Hilary Putnam. Like most other such publications, this book is both blessed and cursed by its origin. It is blessed because it is extremely well researched and carefully argued. It is cursed because it is written too carefully, making its most important points overly tentatively and, because of its cautious approach, making it difficult to see why Gendler's general theory of though experiments is better or more interesting than other traditional and "accepted" theories.