Things that bother me : death, freedom, the self, etc. / Galen Strawson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Strawson, Galen, author.

Series:

New York Review Books classics

New York Review books classics

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy, British--20th century.

Philosophy, British.

Philosophy, British--21st century.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

236 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : New York Review of Books, [2018]

Summary:

Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly-in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, "A Fallacy of Our Age" (an inspiration for Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliché that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. "The Sense of the Self" offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. "Real Naturalism" argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s. Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder. Book jacket.

Contents:

The sense of the self

A fallacy of our age

I have no future

Luck swallows everything

You cannot make yourself the way you are

The silliest claim

Real naturalism

The unstoried life

Two years' time.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Online version: Strawson, Galen. Things that bother me.

ISBN:

9781681372204

1681372207

OCLC:

1019841467