Galen Strawson – Mistaken Identity

Somewhere in my recent past, since this 2011 post, I have conflated Ray Tallis with Galen Strawson in my mind, not having read the original work of either other than their reviews / opinions of others. Doubly weirdly, I’d completely forgotten Jack Klaff had been the host / chair, someone I follow closely on Twitter these days, and probably conflation of Wolpert (in the audience) with Tallis (on the stage) that led to the original confusion.

I’ve been correcting my mistaken impression of Strawson recently – in his sympathy for pan-psychist views – and notice his book “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?” was published as long ago as before the 2006 paperback. And I realise now my poor impression of Strawson was tangled up in the negative response of MoQ’ers to his negative review of Pirsig’s “Lila” – calling the Subject-Object view a straw-man – also back in 2006. (The negative impression of Strawson no doubt further conflated with that of rhyming with “Struan”, a different beast altogether in the Pirsig/MoQ context. Word association memes are dangerous.)

Part of properly connecting with Strawson was to find an early 2011 reference to his appearance on In Our Time on Free Will, my first blogged reference to him in fact, an episode I re-listened to again recently for quite unconnected reasons. Anyway apart from the book reference, as I noted in a recent link dump, I have some Strawson / Panpsychism articles bookmarked:

• • • (2003) ‘What is the Relation Between An Experience, the Subject of the Experience, and the Content of the Experience?’ (2003) this paper is superseded by revised version in Real Materialism and Other Essays | Galen Strawson – Academia.edu
    • (2006) Real Intentionality 3 | Galen Strawson (2006) – Academia.edu
    • (2016) Mind and Being: The Primacy of Panpsychism 2016 | Galen Strawson – Academia.edu

Managed not to notice his association with UoT at Austin, Tx – somewhere I’ve crossed paths more than once in person. Weird. Anyway impressions corrected.