Speaker

Galen Strawson

Galen Strawson

British analytic philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (previously Reading and the City University of New York). Strawson works on consciousness, materialism, the self, and free will, and is among the most forceful contemporary defenders of the view that a thoroughgoing physicalism leads not away from consciousness but straight to panpsychism. He is the son of the philosopher P. F. Strawson.

Strawson describes himself as a real physicalist (or ‘real materialist’): everything that exists is physical, and physics has a description to give of it — but physics describes only the structure of reality, never the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure it measures. Since experience is undeniably real and everything real is physical, experience must be a fundamental physical feature of the world. He regards illusionism — the denial that phenomenal consciousness exists — as the silliest claim ever made, on the ground that an illusion of experience is already an experience.

Core positions

Real physicalism entails panpsychism. Because there is no radical (unexplained, magical) emergence anywhere in nature, consciousness cannot have arisen from stuff that was wholly non-conscious; it must already be present, in some form, at the foundation of things. Panpsychism is the honest consequence of taking physicalism seriously, not a departure from it.

Against narrativity. In his widely-discussed essay ‘Against Narrativity’ (2004), Strawson rejects the popular claim that a well-lived or fully human life must be experienced as a unfolding story. He distinguishes ‘Diachronic’ self-experience (a self persisting through time) from ‘Episodic’ self-experience (living without any strong sense of a continuous narrative self), and argues the Episodic life is neither deficient nor rare.

Free-will scepticism — the Basic Argument. Strawson argues that ultimate moral responsibility is impossible: to be truly responsible for your actions you would have to be responsible for how you are, which would require you to have created yourself — an infinite regress no one can complete. Nothing can be causa sui, so no one is ultimately responsible in the sense the notion demands.

In the wiki