Actual Consciousness is the latest version of Ted Honderich's new and widely discussed theory of consciousness. In an earlier iteration he called his theory – the focus of a double issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2006 – ‘Radical Externalism’. Honderich's audience is fellow analytic philosophers (who work in accord with what Honderich calls ‘mainstream philosophy’). For theologians, this clear but technical book provides a reliable roadmap to the five leading ‘mainstream’ ideas about consciousness (namely: ‘qualia, something it is like to be a thing, subjectivity, intentionality, or aboutness, and phenomenality’, p. xiii), and also to the various problems which have kept any of these theories, each of which is highly developed, from general acceptance. Moreover, Honderich maps, and in many instances briefly summarises, the essential contributions of every major, English-language participant in the mainstream debate. The summaries are necessarily and admittedly insufficient, but are accurate as far as they go, and also help to map the mainstream conceptual landscape.

In a word, Honderich's goal is to give a complete explanation of what consciousness is. In contrast to what Honderich takes to be ongoing confusion over the existence of free will, which for him simply does not exist, there is no denying that consciousness actually is. So the mainstream challenge is to explain consciousness while remaining within the parameters of modern science, which means explaining how consciousness is physical. More precisely, for Honderich this means that consciousness must be: in the inventory of science, open to scientific method, in space and time, and in particular and categorical lawful connections with other realities (these are essential criteria of ‘physical’).

Honderich suggests that working within the parameters of the physical in this modern scientific sense allows one to avoid trafficking in metaphysics. This illicit and all-too-common suggestion insulates mainstream philosophy by masking the fact that its metaphysic is asserted, nowhere established. Insofar as free will and creativity (in the ordinary senses), moral reality and personal responsibility, let alone God, are essential to theology, what Honderich asserts as basic to any credible understanding forecloses upon the credibility of theology (for none of these fit in Honderich's ‘mainstream’ ontology).

Honderich argues that reality (i.e. ‘physicality’) has two aspects. There is an objective physical world and also (his startling, novel move) subjective physicality. Consciousness is endemic to/is subjective physicality and has two parts, the subjective physical worlds of perceptual consciousness and the subjective physical representations of cognitive consciousness and affective consciousness. Honderich's theory may well become the sixth leading idea about consciousness, but it is far from clear it can eliminate even mainstream philosophers’ fear that the essence of consciousness remains elusive.

Honderich's idea of ‘subjective physicality’ is oddly reminiscent of Heidegger's idea of ‘world’, but since for Honderich consciousness remains in time, he never escapes what Heidegger identifies as a ‘crass’ understanding of time. So Honderich never approaches Heidegger's far more revolutionary understanding of the relation among time, Dasein, physicality, cause, reality and truth. Honderich has only disdain for metaphysicians such as Heidegger, but as one recognises the insufficiencies not only of the five leading mainstream ideas about consciousness, but also the insufficiency of Honderich's theory, it is hard not to be reminded of Husserl, who, precisely because of his brilliance and rigour, in failure stimulated the revolutionary philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas, which derail the naturalistic metaphysics of ‘mainstream philosophy’ and set us on the path to rigorous (i.e. clear (if difficult), consistent, complete and general) and far more illuminating understandings of consciousness, free will, creativity and moral reality and, in good ‘love of wisdom’ fashion, remain in dialogue with the world's classic wisdom traditions.