Against Consciousness

• Pavlov by Jeffrey Gray
  Fontana, 140 pp, £1.25, September 1980, ISBN 0 00 634304 X
• J.B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviourism by David Cohen
  Routledge, 297 pp, £8.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0054 5

Jeffrey Gray’s scientific biography of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is a worthy member of the distinguished Modern Masters series, which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert knowledge of experimental work in animal behaviour and the relevance of experiments on animals to human neurology and psychology. The book is lively, clear and sophisticated in its arguments, and is without a trace of academic pedantry or unnecessary jargon.