Surush Asadi

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.

This chapter was originally delivered as the opening address at Responsibility & Relationships, a conference held at the College of William & Mary in September 2012 in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson’s 1962 paper, “Freedom and Resentment.” The chapter begins with some reflections on this paper, disagrees with it about the source of the sense of freedom, and then considers various ways in which the sort of conceptual reversal that P. F. Strawson suggested for moral responsibility could be fruitfully applied to recent thinking about the persistence of the self.

Many think that the subject of awareness can't be aware of itself as it presently is, any more than the fingertip can touch itself. Here it is argued that [1] the subject of awareness can be present-moment aware of itself non-thetically, and that in exceptional circumstances [2] the subject can be present-moment thetically aware of itself. Concerning [1], the sense is given in which [i] all awareness involves a subject of experience, and in which [ii] awareness is a property of the subject of experience. If one accepts that [iii] all awareness comports awareness of itself, and adds that [iv] awareness of a property of _x_ is _ipso facto_ awareness of _x_, one can derive [1]. Indeed one can derive [3] the subject of awareness is always non-thetically present-moment aware of itself. With regard to [2], it is argued that attentive present-moment self-awareness is achievable in certain meditative states.

I argue for the following claims: [1] all uses of I (the word ‘I’ or thought-element I) are absolutely immune to error through misidentification relative to I. [2] no genuine use of I can fail to refer. Nevertheless [3] I isn’t univocal: it doesn’t always refer to the same thing, or kind of thing, even in the thought or speech of a single person. This is so even though [4] I always refers to its user, the subject of experience who speaks or thinks, and although [5] if I’m thinking about something specifically as myself, I can’t fail to be thinking of myself, and although [6] a genuine understanding use of I always involves the subject thinking of itself as itself, whatever else it does or doesn’t involve, and although [7] if I take myself to be thinking about myself, then I am thinking about myself.