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, e.g. occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, as this occurs in thinking or reading or hearing others speak.

For the last five years philosopher Galen Strawson has provoked a mixture of shock and scepticism with his carefully argued case that physicalism (the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical) entails panpsychism (the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being). In this book Strawson provides the fullest and most careful statement of his position to date, throwing down the gauntlet to his critics — including Peter Carruthers, Frank Jackson, David Rosenthal and J.J.C. Smart — by inviting them to respond in print. The book concludes with Strawson's response to his commentators. Galen Strawson’s books include Mental Reality, The Self? and Freedom and Belief.

'Consciousness', they say, 'is a mystery'. 'We have no idea what consciousness is.' 'The great intellectual task of our time is to explain the existence of consciousness.' This paper argues that these claims are false. Using 'ψ' to denote consciousness, it argues [1] that we know what ψ is (it's not a mystery); [2] that the idea that we need to explain the existence of ψ begs the question; [3] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality that we know for certain to exist; [4] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality whose qualitative nature we know; [5] that in experiencing ψ we know something of the nature of concrete reality as it is in itself; [6] that there is no other case in which we know something of the qualitative nature of concrete reality as it is in itself. It argues further [7] that [1] - [6] are fully compatible with physicalism in the original Vienna-Circle sense of the term; [8] that physicalism is compatible with panpsychism; and [9] that panpsychist physicalism is the most plausible (or if you prefer least implausible) view of the nature of concrete reality.