Published by Cambridge University Press, it includes an introduction from Hopkins and an essay from Wollheim, as well as selections from philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clark Glymour, Adam Morton, Stuart Hampshire, Brian O'Shaughnessy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Nagel, and Donald Davidson.

The essays deal with philosophical questions raised by the work of Freud, including topics such as materialism, intentionality, and theories of the self's structure.

Philosophical Essays on Freud includes an introduction from James Hopkins and selections from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clark Glymour, Adam Morton, Stuart Hampshire, David Sachs, Brian O'Shaughnessy, Richard Wollheim, Ronald de Sousa, Patrick Suppes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Fingarette, Thomas Nagel, Irving Thalberg, David Pears, and Donald Davidson, as well from B. R. Cosin and W. D. Hart.

[4] Glymour's essay, "Freud, Kepler, and the clinical evidence", discusses issues involved in experimentally testing psychoanalytic theory.

Glymour observes that psychoanalysts have opposed evaluating psychoanalysis solely on the basis of statistical hypothesis testing on grounds such as that the hypotheses tested by experimental psychologists are "often no more than surrogates for the genuine article, and inferences from the falsity of such ersatz hypotheses to the falsity of psychoanalysis are not legitimate.

[6] Morton's essay, "Freudian commonsense", addresses Freud's influence on popular thinking about the mind and human motivation.

It provides an account of mental dispositions and character traits, in which Hampshire attempts to explain their development, as well as how impulses come to be inhibited.

Sachs focuses in particular on Freud's view that a person's emotions are always proportionate in nature to their causes and objects, even though their relationship to them may appear to be discrepant or incongruous.

[11] De Sousa's essay, "Norms and the normal", discuses the moral implications of Freud's understanding of human nature.

[19] Davidson's essay, "Paradoxes of irrationality", based on a 1978 lecture, discusses what it means for an action, belief, intention, inference or emotion to be irrational.

She also praised the selections chosen by Wollheim and Hopkins, which she considered well-presented discussions of topics such as Freud's materialism, intentionality, and theories of the self's structure.

[21] Symington believed that the papers included were variable in quality and would not appeal to those with a positivist outlook, but nevertheless found the book as a whole a worthwhile work.

[24] Psychological Medicine wrote that while a few contributors to the book took "an overtly critical stand", the majority "indulge in tortuous ratiocination which does little more than transport the familiar arguments into their own conceptual spheres", concluding that in so doing they "tend to support Freud's own mistrust of philosophical inquiry.

[28] The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum criticized Glymour's views about the problems involved in establishing the accuracy of psychoanalytic theory.

[32] Nagel praised Davidson and Hopkins for thoroughly developing the view that "psychoanalysis can borrow empirical evidence for its most important general foundations from the ubiquitous confirmation of the system of ordinary psychological explanation in everyday life".

[33] In the British Psychoanalytic Society Book Club Leaflet, David Bell described Philosophical Essays on Freud as a "seminal" work.