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138‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. It is a topic in metaphysics and ethics as much as in the philosophy of mind. Its central questions are ‘What is it to act (or choose) freely?’, and ‘What is it to be morally responsible for one’s actions (or choices)?’ These two questions are closely connected, for it seems clear that freedom of action is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, even if it is not sufficient.
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1024Realistic Materialist MonismIn S. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak & David Chalmers (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates, Mit Press. 1999.Short version of 'Real materialism', given at Tucson III Conference, 1998. (1) physicalism is true (2) the qualitative character of experience is real, as most naively understood ... so (3) the qualitative character of experience (considered specifically as such) is wholly physical. ‘How can consciousness possibly be physical, given what we know about the physical?’ To ask this question is already to have gone wrong. We have no good reason (as Priestley and Russell and others observe) to think …Read more
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79The Subject of ExperienceOxford University Press. 2017.Does the self exist? If so, what is its nature? How long do selves last? Galen Strawson draws on literature and psychology as well as philosophy to discuss various ways we experience having or being a self. He argues that it is legitimate to say that there is such a thing as the self, distinct from the human being.
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385Freedom and BeliefOxford University Press. 1986.On the whole, we continue to believe firmly both that we have free will and that we are morally responsible for what we do. Here, the author argues that there is a fundamental sense in which there is no such thing as free will or true moral responsibility (as ordinarily understood). Devoting the main body of his book to an attempt to explain why we continue to believe as we do, Strawson examines various aspects of the "cognitive phenomenology" of freedom--the nature, causes, and consequences of …Read more
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102The 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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195Cognitive phenomenology: real lifeIn Tim Bayne & Michelle Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 285--325. 2011.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 representati…Read more
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671On 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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57Exploring 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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78The 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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37Real 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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The self and the SESMETJournal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 99-135. 1999.Response to commentaries on keynote article.
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95Episodic 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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42Précis 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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81The impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility?In Paul Russell & Oisin Deery (eds.), The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings From the Contemporary Debates, Oxford University Press. pp. 363. 2013.
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341Mental 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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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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66The unhelpfulness of determinism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 149-56. 2000.
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19Freedom 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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211Real 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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