Galen John Strawson (; born 1952) is a British analytic 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, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was for many years a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.
Education and career Strawson, the elder son of Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson, was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford (1959–65), where he won a scholarship to Winchester College (1965–68). He left school at 16, after completing his A-levels and winning a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he read Oriental 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 (audit student) at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne as a French Government Scholar (1977–78).
Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1979 to 2000, first as a Stipendiary Lecturer at several different colleges, 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), Rutgers University (2000), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010) and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (2012). In 2011 he was an Old Dominion Fellow, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University (2011). In 2000, he moved to the University of Reading as professor of philosophy, and was also distinguished professor of philosophy from 2004 to 2007 at the City University of New York Graduate Center. In 2012, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas, Austin, as holder of a new chair in philosophy."Leiter, Brian."
Philosophical work
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 the "Basic Argument", noting that variations of it appear throughout the literature on free will. The argument aims to demonstrate 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 as follows:
You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. To be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental respects. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all. So you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do.Strawson, Galen. "Free Will " in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (1998); "The Bounds of Freedom" in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane (2002).
This argument resembles Arthur Schopenhauer's position in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, summarised 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".E. F. J. Payne, in his Translator's Introduction to Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation
Panpsychism
Strawson has argued that what he calls "realistic physicalism" (or "realistic monism") entails panpsychism.Strawson, G. (2006) "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism", Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 13, Nos. 10–11, Exeter, Imprint Academic pp. 3–31 He writes that "as a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical." He quotes the physicist Arthur Eddington in support of his position as follows: "If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background, at least let us accept the only hint we have received as to the significance of the background—namely that it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as a mental activity. The editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Anthony Freeman, has written that panpsychism is regarded by many as either "plain crazy, or else a direct route back to animism and superstition". But it has a long tradition in Western thought.Skrbina, D. (2005), Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
History of philosophy In his work in the history of philosophy, Strawson has argued for three main claims, all of which have been considered controversial. In his 1989 book The Secret Connexion, he argues that David Hume was not a "Humean" about causation. Hume did not, in other words, believe that everything we rightly think of as causation is really only a matter of regular succession or constant conjunction. (On this view, A causes B without there being any sense at all in which A brings about or gives rise to B.)
In his 2011 book The Evident Connexion, Strawson further argues that Hume is not a "Humean" about personal identity. Hume does not think that the "mind" or "self" is really nothing more than a "bundle of perceptions" or experiences. According to Strawson, while Hume does indeed believe that the "bundle of perceptions" conception of the mind is the only empirically legitimate conception of it, he rejects the idea that it can be a philosophically adequate account of the self, having renounced it in the Appendix to his Treatise Of Human Nature.
Finally, in Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment (2011), Strawson argues that Locke's views on personal identity—his account of what makes a person the same person over time—have, for over 300 years, and with very few exceptions, been misunderstood. He argues that two famous objections to Locke's account that have almost universally been supposed to be valid (one made by Bishop Berkeley in 1732 and repeated by Thomas Reid in 1785, the other made by Bishop Butler in 1736), are not only not objections to Locke's account but are in effect vivid illustrations of Locke's central point. All Locke is really concerned with in his account of personal identity is the question of which of a person's past acts they are morally or legally responsible for, at any given time, and in particular on the Day of Judgment. Locke is also particularly concerned to argue, directly against the spirit of his time, that one can be a materialist and still be an orthodox Christian.
Publications Books Freedom and Belief (1986), . Revised edition (2010), (hardcover), (paperback) The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (1989), . Review by Colin McGinn. Revised edition (2014), Mental Reality (1994), . Revised edition (2009), The Self? (editor) (2005), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (2006), Real Materialism and Other Essays (2008), Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009), . Corrected paperback edition (2011), The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (2011), Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment (2011), The Subject of Experience (2017), Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc. (2018) (New York Review Books), German translation Was mich umtreibt: Tod, Freiheit, Ich (2019) Korean translation 불면의 이유 (2020), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism, 2nd edition, revised and expanded, ed. A. Freeman and G. Horswell, (Exeter: Imprint Academic) (2024), Stuff, Quality, Structure: The Whole Go (2024) (Oxford University Press),
Selected articles "Flames of Hell". Review of Gilles & Jeanne, by Michel Tournier. The Observer, London, March 1, 1987, p. 28. "Idris the Ingénu" Review of The Golden Droplet, by Michel Tournier. London Review of Books, Vol. 10, No. 2, 21 January 1988. "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. "The bounds of freedom" (2001), in The Oxford Handbook on Free Will, ed. R. Kane (Oxford University Press), pp. 441–60. "Hume on himself" (2001), in Essays in Practical Philosophy: From Action to values, ed. D. Egonsson, J. Josefsson, B. Petersson and T. Rønnow-Rasmussen (Aldershot: Ashgate Press), pp. 69–94. "Real Materialism" (2003), in Chomsky and his Critics, ed. L. Antony and N. Hornstein (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 49–88. Reprinted in Real Materialism and Other Essays (2008). "Mental ballistics: the involuntariness of spontaneity" (2003), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, pp. 227–56. "A Fallacy of our Age" ('Against Narrative') in the Times Literary Supplement, 15 October 2004 "Against Narrativity" (2004), Ratio 17, pp. 428–52. "Gegen die Narrativität" (2005), revised and expanded version of "Against Narrativity" in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 53, pp. 3–22. "Episodic ethics" (2005) in Narrative and Understanding Person, ed. D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 85–115. "Why I have no future" (2009) The Philosophers' Magazine, Issue 38 "Against 'corporism': the two uses of I" (2009) Organon F 16, pp. 428–448. "The Self" in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. B. McLaughlin and A. Beckermann (Oxford University Press), pp. 541–64. "5 Questions on Mind and Consciousness" (2009), in Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions (AutomaticPress/VIP,) pp. 191–204. "5 Questions on Action" (2009), in Philosophy of Action: 5 Questions (AutomaticPress/VIP), pp. 253–9. "On the SESMET theory of subjectivity" (2009), in Mind That Abides, ed. D. Skrbina (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), pp. 57–64. "The identity of the categorical and the dispositional" (2008), Analysis 68/4, pp. 271–8. "Radical Self-Awareness" (2010), in Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions, ed. M. Siderits, E. Thompson, and D. Zahavi (Oxford University Press), pp. 274–307. "The depth(s) of the twentieth century" (2010), Analysis 70/4:1. "Fundamental Singleness: subjects as objects (how to turn the first two Paralogisms into valid arguments)" (2010), in The Metaphysics of Consciousness, ed. P. Basile et al.(Cambridge University Press), pp. 61–92. "Narrativity and non-Narrativity" (2010), in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 1, pp. 775–80. "La impossibilidad de la responsabilidad moral en sentido último" (2010), Spanish Translation of "The Impossibility of (Ultimate) Moral Responsibility", in Cuadernos Eticos "Cognitive phenomenology: real life" (2011), in Cognitive Phenomenology, ed.T. Bayne and M. Montague (Oxford University Press), pp. 285–325. "The impossibility of ultimate responsibility?" in Free Will and Modern Science, ed. R. Swinburne (London: British Academy) (December), pp. 126–40. "Owning the Past: Reply to Stokes" (2011), Journal of Consciousness Studies 18, pp. 170–95. "The minimal self" (2011), in Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. S. Gallagher (Oxford University Press), pp. 253–278. "Real naturalism" (2012), in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 86/2, pp. 125–154. "I and I: immunity to error through misidentification of the subject" (2012), in Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays, ed. S. Prosser and F. Recanati (Cambridge University Press) "All My Hopes Vanish: Hume’s Appendix" (2012), in The Continuum Companion to Hume, ed. A Bailey and D. O’Brien (London: Continuum)