Galen Strawson

Aristotle, Dignāga, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Brentano, Sartre and many others are right about the nature of conscious awareness: all such awareness comports—somehow carries within itself—awareness of itself . This is a necessary condition of awareness being awareness at all: no ‘higher-order’ account of what makes conscious states conscious can be correct. But is very paradoxical: it seems to require that awareness be somehow already present, in such a way as to be available to itself as object of awareness, in order to be constituted as awareness in the first place. Can anything relate to itself in this way? Can there be a relation that is necessarily one-term, reflexive, non-logical , concretely realizable, dynamically real, such that its holding is a necessary condition of the existence of the thing it holds of? It helps to consider the thought this very thought is puzzling. Many accept the reality of the kind of awareness of awareness posited in and , and think it must be not only ‘pre-reflective’ and ‘non-positional’, but also irrelational or non-intentional. But perhaps such awareness of awareness can be fully relational and fully intentional, and can be legitimately said to be its own object or content, even while being pre-reflective and non-positional

[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’.

(1) Materialists hold that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is a wholly physical phenomenon. (2) Consciousness ('what-it's-likeness', etc.) is the most certainly existing real, concrete phenomenon there is. It follows that (3) all serious materialists must grant that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon. ‘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, Eddington, Russell and others observe) to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that consciousness is wholly physical.

It is widely supposed that David Hume invented and espoused the "regularity" theory of causation, holding that causal relations are nothing but a matter of one type of thing being regularly followed by another. It is also widely supposed that he was not only right about this, but that it was one of his greatest contributions to philosophy. Strawson here argues that the regularity theory of causation is indefensible, and that Hume never adopted it in any case. Strawson maintains that Hume did not claim that causation in the natural world is just a matter of regular succession, that such a dogmatic metaphysical claim about the nature of reality would have been utterly contrary to his fundamental philosophical principles, and that he rightly took it for granted that there was more to causation than regularity of succession, claiming only that regularity of succession was all that we could ever know of causation.

Suppose that X and Y can’t possibly exist apart in reality; then—by definition—there’s no real distinction between them, only a conceptual distinction. There’s a conceptual distinction between a rectilinear figure’s triangularity and its trilaterality, for example, but no real distinction. In fundamental metaphysics there is no real distinction between an object’s categorical properties and its dispositional properties. So too there is no real distinction between an object and its properties. And in fundamental metaphysics, for X and Y to be such that there is no real distinction between them is for them to be identical.

Intencionalnost je esencijalno mentalni, esencijalno zgodimični, te esencijalno iskustveni fenomen. Svaki pokušaj karakteriziranja intencionalnosti koji je izdvaja iz svjesnog iskustva suočuje se s dva nesavladiva problema. Prvo, obvezno je priznati da gotovo sve ima intencionalnost – sve do subatomskih čestica. Drugo, ima za posljedicu da sve što ima intencionalnost, ima je puno previše – možda beskonačno mnogo. Ključ zadovoljavajuće i istinski naturalističke teorije intencionalnosti jest realistička koncepcija naturalizma i ispravno razvijeno razumijevanje fenomena spoznajnog iskustva.Intentionality is an essentially mental, essentially occurrent, and essentially experiential phenomenon. Any attempt to characterize intentionality that detaches it from conscious experiencefaces 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 consequencethat everything that has intentionality has far too much of it – perhaps an infinite amount. The keyto a satisfactory and truly naturalistic theory of intentionality is a realistic conception of naturalismand a properly developed understanding of the phenomenon of cognitive experience.

Recommends an approach to the philosophical problem about the existence and nature of the self in which the author models the problem of the self rather than attempting to model the self. It is suggested that the sense of the self is the source in experience of the philosophical problem of the self. The first question to ask is the phenomenological question: What is the nature of the sense of the self? But this, in the first instance, is best taken as a question explicitly about human beings: as the local phenomenological question What is the nature of the human sense of the self? Whatever the answer to is, it raises the general phenomenological question Are there other possibilities when it comes to a sense of the self? The answers to and raise the conditions question What are the grounds or preconditions of possession of a sense of the self? and this question raises a battery of subsidiary questions. If one can produce satisfactory answers to,, and, one will be in a good position to raise and answer the factual question, the fundamental and straightforward metaphysical question is there such a thing as the self? 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

It is sometimes said that reasoning, thought and judgement essentially involve action. It is sometimes said that they involve spontaneity, where spontaneity is taken to be connected in some constitutive way with action-intentional, voluntary and indeed free action. There is, however, a fundamental respect in which reason, thought and judgement neither are nor can be a matter of action; and any spontaneity they involve can be connected with freedom only when the word 'freedom' is used in the Spinozan-Kantian sense according to which freedom is a matter of 'rational necessitation', determination by reason

[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid.