This book brings cutting edge neuroscience and psychology into dialogue with philosophical reflection to illuminate the loss of control experienced by addicts, and thereby cast light on ordinary agency and the way in which it sometimes goes wrong.

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.