In the Critics section of this week's New Statesman [2], ten pages of which are devoted to a philosophy special, our Critic at Large is Colin McGinn, professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, who surveys the current state of play in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. Although McGinn concedes, in the spirit Descartes, the irrefutable existence of the self, he cautiously downplays the scope of the intellect: "Human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient." In Socratic vein, McGinn asserts: "There is more ignorance ... than knowledge."

In Books, Alain de Botton reviews The Philosophical Life: 12 Great Thinkers and the Search for Wisdom, from Socrates to Nietzsche by James Miller. What, says de Botton, sets these seminal thinkers apart is that they pursue salient experience rather than intellectual vanity: "Miller presents 12 philosophers, great names including Socrates, Seneca, Montaigne, Kant and Nietzsche. What draws Miller to them is that they are all, in different ways, utterly unlike what a modern philosophical academic is expected to be. They don't want to be clever, they want to know how to live. They want to be wise." Moreover, de Botton notes that Miller's prose is intended for the layman, not his fellow professionals: "He is to be commended for leaving behind the sterile practices of his colleagues and speaking to civilian readers."

In the Books Interview, Jonathan Derbyshire speaks to Professor Charles Taylor about his latest work, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. The book responds to the need in modern western societies for political structures that accomodate the full breadth of moral and religious diversity: "The original model of secularism was one in which a very dominant religious group had to fight with other kinds of tendencies. That was the situation in France in the 19th century but doesn't at all describe modern-day Canada or the UK. The kind of secularism [advanced in the book] answers the question,'"How do we live together?'"

Also in Books: Giles Fraser reviews Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. Fraser notes Critchley's atheism, and his argument that Christianity's perennial relevance lies in its alter ego, politics: "Modern political discourse is sublimated theology. And the only way properly to get at the unspoken drivers of much political philosophy is to recognise them as expressions of theological desire". Other reviews: Edward Skidelsky on Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation by Richard Sennett; and Jennie Erdal on Humean influences in her forthcoming novel, The Missing Shade of Blue. PLUS: Sarah Waters pays tribute to Angela Carter on the 20th anniversary of her death.

Elsewhere in Critics: Ryan Gilbey on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Antonia Quirke on Steven Spielberg; Kate Mossman on Paul Weller; and Helen Lewis on Contre Jour. PLUS: Will Self's "Real Meals".