Galen Strawson

Galen John Strawson (* 1952 ) is a British philosopher and literary critic . He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and currently at the University of Texas at Austin. Until 2007, Strawson also taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . His main focus is on philosophy of mind , metaphysics and moral philosophy . Galen Strawson is the son of Sir Peter Frederick Strawson .

Free will

Strawson argues that there is no way people can have free will , whether or not determinism is true. His position is thus similar to that of Derk Pereboom , for whom the latter coined the expression "severe incompatibilities".

His argument is based on the question "Are people ever ultimately responsible for their actions - in a not only causal but also moral sense, that is, praise and blame justifying?" And denies them as follows:

1. We do what we do because we are who we are.
2. In order to be ultimately responsible for what we do, we would have to be responsible for who we are, at least in crucial ways.
3. We cannot ultimately be responsible for how we are.
4. So ultimately we cannot be responsible for what we do.

Strawson draws the conclusion: Our decisions are determined by our character - and possibly also by (indeterministic) random events, for which we are just as little responsible as for our genetic heritage and the experiences we have had. This also applies to our past decisions, which have shaped our character today. How we are is “ultimately - down to the smallest detail - a matter of luck”. To reward actions, resp. Punishing them is therefore “exactly as fair” as assigning wages or punishment to people for their hair color or face shape.

Panpsychism

In the discussion about the mind-body problem , Strawson takes the view that the position of strict physicalism necessarily also calls for a panpsychistic view, and thus has a significant share in the growing interest in panpsychism in the philosophy of mind in the 21st century .

Fonts

• Freedom and Belief. 1986. 2nd, revised. Output. Oxford University Press , 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-924750-9 .
• Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-926742-2 .
• Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-825006-7 .
• The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-960850-8 .
• Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment. Princeton University Press , Princeton 2011, ISBN 978-0-691-14757-4 .
• Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self etc. New York: New York Review of Books Inc., 2018

Web links

• Literature by and about Galen Strawson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website at the University of Reading (English)
• personal homepage (english)
• Original text "Free Will" Lemma in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (English)
• Original text "The Self" essay, originally in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ leiterreports.typepad.com
2. ^ Staff Profile: Professor Galen Strawson. (No longer available online.) University of Reading, archived from the original on May 15, 2012 ; Retrieved November 29, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Press Release: Graduate Center Adds Five New Faculty Members. CUNY Graduate Center, accessed December 3, 2011 . 
4. ↑ Real Materialism and Other Essays. (No longer available online.) OUP, archived from the original on November 2, 2011 ; Retrieved December 3, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ^ Arguments for Incompatibilism. SEP , accessed June 8, 2012 . 
6. ^ Galen Strawson: The Bounds of Freedom . In: Robert Kane (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Free Will . 2002, ISBN 0-19-517854-8 , pp. 442 f., 448 f., 458 .
7. ^ Panpsychism. SEP , accessed June 8, 2012 .