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640On the inevitability of freedom (from the compatibilist point of view)American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (4): 393-400. 1986.This paper argues that ability to do otherwise (in the compatibilist sense) at the moment of initiation of action is a necessary condition of being able to act at all. If the argument is correct, it shows that Harry Frankfurt never provided a genuine counterexample to the 'principles of alternative possibilities' in his 1969 paper ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’. The paper was written without knowledge of Frankfurt's paper.
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98The minimal subjectIn Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article examines the metaphysics and phenomenology of the self or subject of experience. It suggests that the phenomenological description of the minimal subject requires no reference to body, environment, or social relations and argues for a thin conception of subjectivity which equates the subject with the experience itself. Under this principle of minimal conception, the subject does not exist if the person is asleep. It contends that the profound metaphysical question about experience a…Read more
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43Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityLexington Books. 2013.Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications
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Libertarianism, action, and self-determinationIn Timothy O'Connor (ed.), Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, Oxford University Press. 1995.
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76The Contingent Reality of Natural NecessityAnalysis 51 (4). 1991.Nicholas Everitt's objection to my discussion of the regularity theory of causation is a common one. Ithink it misses the point, but the point it misses is in a way a delicate one, and hard to express, and the general worry he expresses is a natural one. For that reason it is important, and its importance is reflected in the fact that it is very difficult to find a satisfyingly substantive way of stating the difference between regularity theories of causation and non-regularity theories of …Read more
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258Real Intentionality V.2: Why Intentionality Entails ConsciousnessSynthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 279-297. 2005.Intentionality is an essentially mental, essentially occurrent, and essentially experiential phenomenon. Any attempt to characterize intentionality that detaches it from conscious experience faces two insuperable problems. First, it is obliged to concede that almost everything has intentionality—all the way down to subatomic particles. Second, it has the consequence that everything that has intentionality has far too much of it—perhaps an infinite amount. The key to a satisfactory and truly natu…Read more
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201Episodic EthicsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60 85-116. 2007.I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.
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37Précis of Mental Reality (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (2): 433-435. 1998.Replies to commentaries on the book Mental Reality by Noam Chomsky, Michael Smith, Paul Snowdon, Pascal Engel
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The self and the SESMETJournal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 99-135. 1999.Response to commentaries on keynote article.
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333Mental RealityMIT Press. 1994.Introduction -- A default position -- Experience -- The character of experience -- Understanding-experience -- A note about dispositional mental states -- Purely experiential content -- An account of four seconds of thought -- Questions -- The mental and the nonmental -- The mental and the publicly observable -- The mental and the behavioral -- Neobehaviorism and reductionism -- Naturalism in the philosophy of mind -- Conclusion: The three questions -- Agnostic materialism, part 1 -- Monism -- T…Read more
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81The impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility?In Paul Russell & Oisin Deery (eds.), The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings From the Contemporary Debates, Oup Usa. pp. 363. 2009.
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5Intencionalidad real 3: por qué la intencionalidad entraña concienciaTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 35-69. 2008.
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8Stvarna intencionalnost 2. Zašto intencionalnost stvara svijest?Filozofska Istrazivanja 26 (2): 297-318. 2006.
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65The unhelpfulness of determinism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 149-56. 2000.
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16Freedom and Belief: Revised EditionOxford University Press UK. 1986.This is a revised and updated edition of Galen Strawson's groundbreaking first book, where he argues that there is a fundamental sense in which there is no such thing as free will or true moral responsibility. This conclusion is very hard to accept. On the whole we continue to believe firmly both that we have free will and that we are truly morally responsible for what we do. Strawson devotes much of the book to an attempt to explain why this is so. He examines various aspects of the 'cognitive …Read more
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207Real intentionalityPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (3): 287-313. 2004.This version of this paper has been superseded by a substantially revised version in G. Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays (OUP 2008)
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100David Hume: objects and powerIn Stewart Duncan & Antonia LoLordo (eds.), Debates in Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, Routledge. pp. 231. 2000.
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On the Inevitability of Freedom from a Compatibilist Point of ViewAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 23 (4): 393-400. 1986.According to standard compatibilist accounts of freedom, human beings act freely just so long as they are, when they act, free from constraints of certain specified kinds. Such accounts of freedom are examples of what one may call Constraint Compatibilism (CC). I will argue that, properly understood, CC entails not only that we are virtually always able to act freely, but also that virtually all if not all our actual actions are free. The suggestion is not so much that this is a hitherto unnotic…Read more
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74Knowledge of the WorldNoûs 36 (s1). 2002.reprinted as 'Can We Know the Nature of Reality As It Is In Itself' in Galen Strawson, Real Materialism, 2008: Many hold that it is impossible in principle for finite creatures like ourselves to know anything of the nature of non-mental concrete reality as it is in itself, even if we can be said to know the nature of the qualitative character of our own experiences (as it is in itself) just in having them. I argue that there is no insuperable obstacle to knowledge of the nature of non-mental con…Read more
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87Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and ConcernmentPrinceton University Press. 2011.This book argues that in fact it is Locke 's critics who are wrong, and that the famous objections to his theory are invalid.
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2The experiential and the non-experientialIn Richard Warner & Tadeusz Szubka (eds.), The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate, Blackwell. 1994.
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191Intentionality and experience: Terminological preliminariesIn David Woodruff Smith & Amie L. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 41--66. 2005.
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