Galen Strawson

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn’t just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is also cognitive in character, through and through. This is obviously true of ordinary human perceptual experience, and cognitive phenomenology is also concerned with something more exclusively cognitive, which we may call propositional meaning-experience: occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, for example, as this occurs in thinking or reading or hearing others speak. One source of resistance to accepting this view has been a failure to distinguish sharply between cognitive content and cognitive-phenomenological content.

[1] Experience is a real concrete phenomenon. The existence of experience entails the existence of a subject of experience. Therefore subjects of experience are concretely real. [2] The existence of a subject of experience in the lived present or living moment of experience, e.g. the period of time in which the grasping of a thought occurs, provably involves the existence of singleness or unity of an unsurpassably strong kind. The singleness or unity in question is a metaphysically real, concrete entity. So if thoughts, or any experiences at all, really do occur or exist – and they do – then there exist entities that are genuine, concrete, metaphysical unities of an unsurpassable sort. [3] There is a metaphysically irreproachable sense in which we may – must – take these unsurpassable metaphysical unities to be themselves subjects of experience, although we may also take them to be thoughts or experiences. If so, there is a sound argument to the conclusion of the 2nd Paralogism. [4] Perhaps and are not in the final analysis distinct. Perhaps Kant is right, in his 1772 letter to Herz, that ‘the thinking or the existence of the thought and the existence of my own self are one and the same’.

Many think John Locke's account of personal identity is inconsistent and circular. It's neither of these things. The root causes of the misreading are [i] the mistake of thinking that Locke uses 'consciousness' to mean memory, [ii] failure to appreciate the importance of the ‘concernment’ that always accompanies ‘consciousness’, on Locke's view, [iii] a tendency to take the term 'person', in Locke's text, as if it were only some kind of fundamental sortal term like ‘human being’ or ‘thinking thing’, and to fail to take proper account of Locke's use of it as a forensic term. It's well known that Locke uses 'person' as a forensic term, but the consequences of this have still not been fully worked out

In this paper I try to give an account of necessary and sufficient conditions of true freedom of action, of true or ultimate responsibility, even while acknowledging that such ultimate responsibility is impossible, because one of the conditions—being causa sui, or absolutely self-originating—is unfulfillable. I consider various forms of the ‘able-to-choose’ condition on freedom, and summarize the argument in part III of my book Freedom and Belief for the seemingly paradoxical claim that one of the conditions of truly free action is believing that you are free. Much of the discussion is intended as a contribution to the phenomenology of agency and in particular the phenomenology of the experience of freedom.

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 and experiential selves is whether experience is limited to certain types of physical processes, or is characteristic of all physical processes, which would entail panpsychism.

Many hold that (1) consciousness poses a uniquely hard problem. Why is this so? Chalmers considers 12 main answers in 'The Meta-Problem of Consciousness'. This paper focuses on number 11, and is principally addressed to those who endorse (1) because they think that (2) consciousness can't possibly be physical. It argues that to hold (2) is to make the mistake of underestimating the physical, and that almost all who make this mistake do so because they think they know more about the physical than they do. When we see things right, we see that there is nothing in physics nor in our everyday experience of the physical that gives us any good reason to hold (2). This leaves us free to embrace the overwhelmingly strong reasons for accepting that (3) consciousness is wholly physical. The correct general response is the same as the response to wave-particle duality: acceptance without expectation of understanding.

Identity metaphysics finds identity or unity where other metaphysical theories find difference or diversity. It denies the fundamentality of ontological distinctions that other theories treat as fundamental. It’s opposed to separatism, which mistakes natural conceptual distinctions for ground-floor ontological differences. It proposes that the distinctions between the concepts substance, object, quality, property, process, state, and event are metaphysically superficial; so too the distinctions between the concepts energy, lawsofnature, force, causation, power, and naturalnecessity. So too the distinction between these two sets of concepts. “Thinking takes apart what is really one”.

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 causation. I have had no new ideas about how to do this [...], but I will restate some of [my older] ideas [...], in order to try to answer Everitt [...].

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 concrete reality as it is in itself, even if we have very little as a matter of fact.

According to the ‘conceivability argument’ [1] it’s conceivable that a conscious human being H may have a perfect physical duplicate H* who isn’t conscious, [2] whatever is conceivable is possible, therefore [3] H* may possibly exist. This paper argues that the conceivability argument can’t help in discussion of the ‘mind–body problem’ even if [2] is allowed to be true. This is not because [1] is false, but because we don’t and can’t know enough about the nature of the physical to know whether or not [1] is true. This follows from ‘the silence of physics’—the fact that physics neither does nor can tell us about the intrinsic non-structural nature of the physical, and the consequences of this fact for any adequate account of the meaning of the word ‘physical’.