Real Materialism

Galen Strawson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and Professor of Philosophy at Reading University, UK. Prior to that he was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Jesus College, Oxford (1987-2000). He has held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University (1993), New York University (1997), and Rutgers University (2000). Strawson received his degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm) and the Sorbonne (1977-8). He is also Philosophy editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

• Introduction ; 1. Real Materialism ; 2. Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism ; 3. Can we know the nature of reality as it is in itself? ; 4. Red and 'red' ; 5. Self, body, and experience ; 6. What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience? ; 7. Against narrativity ; 8. Episodic ethics ; 9. Mental ballistics: the involuntariness of spontaneity ; 10. Intentionality and experience: terminological preliminaries ; 11. Real intentionality: why intentionality entails consciousness ; 12. On the inevitability of freedom (from the compatibilist point of view ) ; 13. The impossibility of moral responsibility ; 14. Consciousness, free will, and the unimportance of determinism ; 15. Free agents ; 16. Realism and causation ; 17. The contingent reality of natural necessity ; 18. David Hume: objects and power ; 19. Epistemology, semantics, ontology, and David Hume ; Bibliography ; Index

gives a clear, rational and sympathetic picture of humanity's place in a wholly material rrality.