Galen Strawson

Galen John Strawson (born 1952) is a British philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics (including free will, panpsychism, the mind-body problem, and the self), Locke, Hume and Kant. He read Islamic Studies, Social and Political Science, and Moral Sciences at the University of Cambridge (1969-73), and received his BPhil in philosophy (1977) and his DPhil in philosophy (1983) from the University of Oxford. He also spent a year as an auditeur libre at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and at the Université de Paris (1) as a French Government Scholar (1977-8).

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1979-2000, first as a Stipendiary Lecturer at University College (1979-80), Exeter College (1980-83), St Hugh’s College (1983-5), New College (1985-6), and St Hilda’s College (1986-7), and then, from 1987 on, as Fellow and Tutor of Jesus College Oxford. In 1993 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, Canberra. He has also taught as a Visiting Professor at NYU (1997) and Rutgers University (2000). He is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Reading and is a regular visitor at the City University of New York Graduate Center Philosophy Program. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Galen Strawson is the son of the celebrated philosopher Peter Frederick Strawson. He has five children, Emilie, Tom, Georgia, Harry and Ivo.

Galen Strawson also loves cricket.

Free will

In the free will debate, Strawson holds that there is a fundamental sense in which free will is impossible, whether determinism is true or not. He argues for this position with what he calls his "basic argument", which aims to show that no-one is ever ultimately morally responsible for their actions, and hence that no one has free will in the sense that usually concerns us. In its simplest form, the Basic Argument runs thus:

1. We do what we do, in a given situation, because we are what we are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what we do, we have to be ultimately responsible for what we are — at least in certain crucial mental respects.
3. But we cannot, as the first point avers, be ultimately responsible for what we are, because, simply, we are what we are; we cannot be causa sui.
4. Therefore, we cannot be ultimately responsible for what we do.

"I like philosophers," said Strawson in 2003. "I love what they do; I love what I do — but they have made a truly unbelievable hash of all this. They've tried to make the phrase 'free will' mean all sorts of different things, and each of them has told us that what it really means is what he or she has decided it should mean; but they haven't made the slightest impact on what it really means, or on our old, deep conviction that free will is something we have."

References

• Feinberg, Joel; Shafer-Landau, Russ: Reason & Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy: Thirteenth Edition (Thomson Wadsworth, 2008).
• Sommers, Tamler: The buck stops—where? Living without ultimate responsibility (The Believer, March 2003). Weblink: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_strawson.

Books

• Freedom and Belief (1986) ISBN 0198239335
• The Secret Connexion (1989) ISBN 0198240384
• Mental Reality (1994) ISBN 0262193523
• The Self? (editor) (2005) ISBN 1405129875
• Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does physicalism entail panpsychism? (2006) ISBN 1845400593
• Real Materialism and Other Essays (2008) ISBN 9780199267439

Selected Articles

• "Red and 'Red'" (1989),Synthese 78 pp 193-232
• "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility" (1994), Philosophical Studies 75 pp 5-24
• " 'The self' " (1997) Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 pp 405-28
• "Real Materialism" (2003), in Chomsky and his Critics ed. L. Antony & N. Hornstein (Oxford: Blackwell), pp 49-88
• "Mental ballistics: the involuntariness of spontaneity" (2003) Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society pp 227-56
• "Against narrativity" (2004) Ratio 16 pp 428-52
• "Episodic ethics" (2005) in "Narrative and Understanding Person" ed. D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp 85-115

External links

• Galen Strawson's website
• Galen Strawson at the CUNY Graduate Center
• Galen Strawson at the University of Reading
• Consciousness and its place in nature Imprint Academic
• "Free Will" in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• " 'The self' " (1997)
• "Against narrativity" (2004)

Interview on Free Will

• The buck stops—where? Living without ultimate responsibility