This is an attractively written and deeply illuminating study of Freud as moral philosopher. Perhaps many readers of this journal will feel vaguely that Freud is passé, his claims to science disproved, and that detailed archival work has overtaken the founding fictions of psychoanalysis. Yet an unending stream of publications suggests otherwise. This book goes a long way to explain the positive side of the continued interest and, indeed, to explain why Freud will continue to fascinate, leaving far behind by-now stale debate about whether or not he created a science.

A.I. Tauber was for many years director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, and he is also a doctor and professor of medical ethics. These interests come together in moral epistemology. In what ways, once we accept a postpositivist critique of the fact–value demarcation, does knowing, including the knowing which physicians profess, emerge as moral engagement? Freud proves to be rich ground on which to work out the issues and, in the process, explain what matters about Freud's writing. (Not coincidentally, though this is not Tauber's topic, it also points to the reasons why Freud has had so large a historical impact.) In Tauber's persuasive analysis, Freud held to two strictly incompatible stances. Trained in physiology, he promoted a strong view of the empiricist claims of science and argued that theory, including non-observable entities like the unconscious, must derive inductively from facts. Though large philosophical questions attracted him in his youth, and though he attended Franz Brentano's lectures in Vienna, he rather firmly rejected philosophy as outdated by progress in science. He therefore developed what he intended should be a fully naturalistic and deterministic account of human nature. At the same time, though, the practice which resulted, psychoanalysis, unequivocally asserted reason as a moral principle, the causal ground of which in a deterministic universe Freud could not demonstrate. On reason he placed what hopes he had (albeit limited) to turn knowledge to the advantage of human well-being. Freud also posited the unconscious as a ‘meta’ principle, not as an empirical conclusion. The commitment to reason, and the paradox of its existence in the universe which science describes, forced Freud, ‘reluctantly’, to be philosopher, as at times in later life he wryly acknowledged. Tauber clearly discusses the manner in which Freud re-created the Kantian paradox: ‘pure reason’ gives us deterministic science, but ‘practical reason’ leads us to act freely according to an imperative; and where Kant looked to ‘judgement’, Freud sought a ‘bridge’ in the way of life which was psychoanalysis, a humanist moral project to give to individuals the means to live better.

Tauber's writing in its turn re-expresses this humanist project: he respects the reader by writing accessibly, and he respects Freud by writing sympathetically, but he also puts this respect into rigorous scholarship and analysis, on a wide front, examining critically as necessary. His manner is to engage Freud in dialogue with his Kantian legacy and philosophical near-contemporaries (Brentano, Mach and the logical positivists, the neo-Kantians, Schopenhauer and, of course, Nietzsche, as he did indeed address questions to the uncaused ground of reason from which philosophy has not recovered), well aware that this is a matter of critical analysis rather than historical reconstruction. The argument opens with a discussion of Freud's negative attitude as a scientist to philosophy, even if he was educated in the issues which divided empiricists and idealists. A chapter then locates Freud's shift from neurophysiological explanation to the structural theory of the psyche, relating it to the debate about whether reference to unconscious events invokes causes or reasons. This charts the ways Freud deployed causal and hermeneutic forms of understanding. A third chapter details the large Kantian context. The fourth chapter then turns to the paradox which Kant highlighted and bequeathed: freedom in a deterministic universe. Two chapters follow which take up the nature of the subject, the self, and how this was variously understood, relating Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's accounts of the will, Freud's description of unconscious forces and the complex history of the self as reflexive activity. The final chapter relates all this to the driving thesis, ‘the ethical turn’, the discussion of which makes possible judgement about Freud's contribution in terms of its identity as moral project rather than truth-claims. I found it an extremely clear and penetrating discussion not just of Freud but also of the philosophical arguments to which he was heir and which, implicitly if not always explicitly, played themselves out in his writing. There are long endnotes for readers who want more on the issues or on the existing literature (and the bibliography is extensive); Tauber is an admirably assured guide.

Although Freud neither succeeded as a natural scientist (and Tauber is not under any illusion that, by the standards of empirical judgement operative in natural science, Freud did other than ‘fail’), nor engaged in systematic philosophy, by re-creating the humanist project, ‘know thyself’ in order to live well, there are good reasons why he captured a modern audience. It is not simply that he provided new terms with which to tell stories about why we are the way we are – that is, to provide a hermeneutics (though he did do this) – but also that he made the mode of telling stories a moral epistemology, a way of knowing how to live.