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Paul E. Griffiths is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Otago University (New Zealand) who has previously edited a collection of essays on the philosophy of biology. In his most recent book, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories, Griffiths has made an important contribution toward integrating theory and research on emotions from fields as diverse as sociobiology, philosophy of language, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. Griffiths's provocative review of the major theoretical paradigms is disciplined in its attention to the historical contexts of the theories he considers. He demonstrates how those contexts shape the questions that particular theoretical models attempt to answer, and why models fail in their ambitions when they do fail. By laying out the competing paradigms and organizing them according to their basic assumptions, he creates a useful map of the issues confronting a general theory of emotion and argues convincingly for the revision of some basis psychological categories. One of the more interesting results of the author's review of theoretical models is his demonstration of how epistemological and methodological errors create dichotomous categories in psychology. For example, he suggests that the nature versus nurture dichotomy, as it plays itself out in the conflict between evolutionary psychology and the social constructionist theories, is a result of the way that both theories are based on inadequate renditions of psychological development that needs to appreciate, as Griffiths quotes Hull, that “evolution is a matter of ‘genealogical actors in ecological roles’” (p. 235). At the very last, this effort offers readers an opportunity to clarify their own preconceptions about emotions. For the more ambitious, it constitutes a valuable resource,