Reviewed by: Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick Jess Keiser Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2018). Pp. 224; $25.00 paper. Let's begin with a vision of the mind that must appear so intuitive as to seem innate. In this model, the mind is something that sits inside us. That is, thinking happens within some deeply internal space: the skull, the brain, maybe even the pineal gland. It follows that the objects of thought—colors, sounds, artifacts, language, other minds—stand outside this enclosed place, lingering on the other side of the mind's interiority. Surveying such topography, we discover, necessarily, a border between the ideational entities "in here" and the world "out there." Because of this border, commerce between mind and world requires some negotiation. The external universe must make its way into the mind as stimuli slip past skin and other sensory organs. In parallel, the mind, always at least one remove from its surround, must recreate the exterior as an interior. Naturally, it becomes common to liken the mind to a mirror, an entity that reproduces the stuff "out there" as an (hopefully) accurate mimetic double "in here." One of the mind's principal tasks, then, is to represent the world, which is why some philosopher name this model "representationalism." Representationalism, so familiar to us today, is prevalent throughout the eighteenth century. We find it conveyed in the work of philosophers usually imagined as distinct, even discordant. Whether one thinks the mind incorporeal [End Page 463] (Descartes), matter in motion (Hobbes), or the result of some unknown underlying substance (Locke), it is still possible to draw upon this inside/out topography, which is precisely why thinkers as different as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke continually reach for the same images or metaphors to limn the psyche. For them, the mind is a theater (Descartes) or a camera obscura (Locke): a place where projections of the external world are played out before an internal audience. Jonathan Kramnick's important and innovative new book, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, offers an alternative to representationalism. In doing so, his work fundamentally recasts our standard stories about the eighteenth century and its view of the psyche. In a remarkable series of wide-ranging chapters, which impressively balance sharp literary analysis with careful discussions of philosophy, Kramnick demonstrates that the eighteenth century's conception of the mind is more complex than even its best scholars have appreciated. As his book's subtitle indicates, Kramnick uncovers an "ecology" of mind at work within the period. "Ecology" might suggest an account of Enlightenment efforts at conservation or a tour through animal habitats. But Kramnick uses the term in an arguably more capacious sense. For him, "ecology" designates a model of mind. Where the standard, representationalist model stresses the subject/object divide, the ecological alternative maintains a kind of monism: mind and world are not divided but intimately linked. In the ecological topology, the psyche is not a citadel cut off from its surroundings; nor is it an interiority replete with a microcosmic reproduction of the outer world. As Kramnick explains, the ecological model moves us "away from … accessing purely internal or neural states to the coupling of these states with external objects and environments" (6). In other words, we come to know the world not by representing it on an isolated internal canvas but by doing things within it, by shaping the environment and being shaped by it in turn. "We don't so much perceive the world in a single snapshot," Kramnick writes, "as occupy and explore its contents" (6). In delineating the ecological mind, Kramnick draws from the work of contemporary thinkers like Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and J.J. Gibson. For these thinkers, the mental only begins to make sense once we recognize that sensation or cognition are preeminently actions performed by living bodies intermingled with environments. In recent work in philosophy of mind, it has become customary to stress how the thought of Thompson, Noë, and Gibson flows from some twentieth-century sources: e.g., from attacks on the Cartesian subject in...