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), John Locke, David Hume and Kant. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford (1959–65), from where he won a scholarship to Winchester College (1965-8). He left school at sixteen, after completing his A-levels and winning a place at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he read Islamic Studies (1969–71), Social and Political Science (1971–72), and Moral Sciences (1972–73), before moving to the University of Oxford, where he received his BPhil in philosophy in 1977 and his DPhil in philosophy in 1983. He also spent a year as an auditeur libre at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Université de Paris (1) as a French Government Scholar (1977–78).

Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1979 to 2000, first as a Stipendiary Lecturer at University College (1979–80), Exeter College (1980–83), St Hugh's College (1983–85), New College (1985–86), and St Hilda's College (1986–87), 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, where he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy from 2004 to 2006. 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 P. F. Strawson. He has five children, Emilie, Tom, Georgia, Harry and Ivo.

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.^[1]

This argument is cited in the Wikipedia article about Frankfurt counterexamples as a critique of Harry G. Frankfurt's main argument. It resembles Schopenhauer's position in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, summarized by E. F. J. Payne as the "law of motivation, which states that a definite course of action inevitably ensues on a given character and motive."^[2]

See also

• Philosophical zombie

References

• Feinberg, Joel; Shafer-Landau, Russ: Reason & Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy: Thirteenth Edition (Thomson Wadsworth, 2008).

Notes

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
• Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009) ISBN 9780198250067

Selected articles

• "Red and 'Red'" (1989), Synthèse 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 17, 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
• "Free Will" in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• " 'The self' " (1997)
• "The buck stops—where? Living without ultimate responsibility", interview by Tamler Sommers, The Believer, March 2003