Real Materialism: and Other Essays

by Galen Strawson

Real Materialism draws together papers written over twenty years by Galen Strawson in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Strawson focuses on five main areas of [1] the nature of the physical, consciousness, the "mind-body problem," and the prospects for panpsychism; [2] the self, the subject of experience, self-consciousness, and the 'narrative' self; [3] free will and moral responsibility; [4] the nature of thought and intentionality and their connection with consciousness; [5] the problem of causation with particular reference to the philosophy of David Hume.

Genres: Philosophy

478 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2008

About the author

Galen John Strawson is a British professor of philosopher and literary critic primarily workin the fields of mind, metaphysics, and free will.

Reviews

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most moving and amusing and delightful - yet stiff - Introduction to a book of essays in metaphysics that I think I've ever read, containing much wisdom:
"Common sense is fundamental in philosophy, but it doesn't follow that views taken to be part of common sense outside philosophy must prevail within it."
"The older philosophers very often put the issues we discuss today much more clearly directly, and I find it hard not to quote them."
"At this time I had a wife, a daughter, a mortgage and no money. We moved to Paris for a year. Miu wife worked as a capesienne schoolteacher, I attended the Ecole normal superieure as an auditeur libre, joining Jacques Derrida's Groupe de Recherche pour l'Enseignement de la Philosophie and his seminar for Yale students in Paris and trying (with no success) to understand what he was talking about."
"It's hard to imagine a more anti-naturalist than naturalism as currently defined, given that it denies the existence of - treats as supernatural - the fundamentally given natural fact: (conscious) experience. . . . some have persisted in the rigid definition of naturalism, and gone on to embrace - with some passion - the silliest view ever held by any human being."
Young Strawson (our age) also describes the most satisfactory utter dismissal of an aspiring son by a famous father, regarding a paper he wrote challenging his father P.F. Strawson's domain: The paper, "of course, is a piece of extreme revisionary metaphysics, and I am therefore the more happy to report that my father, renowned as a descriptive metaphysician who regarded revisionary metaphysics with considerable suspicion, told me that he thought the conclusion was probably right - if one chose to do philosophy that way at all."

[Stephen Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard-nosed materialism from Strawson, as usual.

"Anyone who is a materialist has got to accept that feelings and emotions are real, so they've just got to accept that they are themselves physical, and that tells them that physics - the subject - doesn't tell us all there is to say about the physical." - GS