Things That Bother Me

An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson’s writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.

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; he is a true essayist, in other words. With Montaigne Strawson also shares 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 cliche that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. The Sense of 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 whole (also known as pan-psychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s. Drawing on literature and life as much philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.