This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded.

• The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind
• Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell Publishing, 1980-2004)
• Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature
• Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted
• Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters

P. M. S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is author of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the first two volumes co-authored with G. P. Baker (Blackwell, 1980–96) and of Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996). He has also written extensively on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, most recently Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003) and History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), both co-authored with M. R. Bennett. He is also co-editor (with Joachim Schulte) and co-translator of the 4th edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).