Real Materialism and Other Essays

by Strawson, Galen

• ISBN13: 9780199267439
• ISBN10: 019926743X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780191556197
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

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 enquiry: [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.

Author Biography

Galen Strawson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and Professor of Philosophy at Reading University, UK. Prior to that he was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Jesus College, Oxford (1987-2000). He has held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University (1993), New York University (1997), and Rutgers University (2000). Strawson received his degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure (rue d'Ulm) and the Sorbonne (1977-8). He is also Philosophy editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Real Materialism	p. 19
Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism	p. 53
Can we Know the Nature of Reality as It is In Itself?	p. 75
Red and 'Red'	p. 101
Self, Body, and Experience	p. 131
What is the Relation Between an Experience, the Subject of the Experience, and the Content of the Experience?	p. 151
Against Narrativity	p. 189
Episodic Ethics	p. 209
Mental Ballistics: the Involuntariness of Spontaneity	p. 233
Intentionality and Experience: Terminological Preliminaries	p. 255
Real Intentionality 3: Why Intentionality Entails Consciousness	p. 281
On the Inevitability of Freedom from the Compatibilist Point of View	p. 307
The Impossibility of Ultimate Moral Responsibility	p. 319
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism	p. 337
Free Agents	p. 359
Realism and Causation	p. 387
The Contingent Reality of Natural Necessity	p. 409
David Hume: Objects and Power	p. 415
Epistemology, Semantics, Ontology, and David Hume	p. 439
Bibliography	p. 455
Index	p. 469
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