Things That Bother Me Quotes

“I find philosophy—philosophy in the largest sense—a profoundly concrete, sensual activity. I know others who feel the same. The world of ideas seems as solid as the world of seas and mountains—or more so. One can no more change its topography than one can move Samarqand closer to Bukhara, although one can discover new views or discover that one has gotten the topography wrong, or that many people have for many years. Ideas seem as embodied, in the world of ideas, with its views and obstructions and vastness, as we do in our material world. They seem tangible, with specific savors, aesthetic properties, emotional tones, curves, surfaces, insides, hidden places, structure, geometry, dark passages, shining corners, auras, force fields, and combinatorial chemistry. This is one great reason why “travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy,” as Bertrand Russell said, and why “it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored.”
― Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.

“By the “sense of the self ” I mean—at least—the sense that people have of themselves as being, specifically, a mental presence, a mental someone, a mental locus of awareness, conscious mental subject that is distinct from all its particular experiences, thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings, and so on. This sense of self comes to every normal human being, in some form, in childhood.”
― Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.