Real Materialism and Other Essays

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.

1 - Real Materialism
2 - Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism
3 - Can we know the nature of reality as it is in itself?
4 - Red and 'red'
5 - Self, body, and experience
6 - What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience?
7 - Against narrativity
8 - Episodic ethics
9 - Mental ballistics: the involuntariness of spontaneity
10 - Intentionality and experience: terminological preliminaries
11 - Real intentionality: why intentionality entails consciousness
12 - On the inevitability of freedom (from the compatibilist point of view )
13 - The impossibility of moral responsibility
14 - Consciousness, free will, and the unimportance of determinism
15 - Free agents
16 - Realism and causation
17 - The contingent reality of natural necessity
18 - David Hume: objects and power
19 - Epistemology, semantics, ontology, and David Hume

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 Supérieure (rue d'Ulm) and the Sorbonne (1977-8). He is also Philosophy editor at the Times Literary Supplement.