Real Materialism and Other Essays - Galen Strawson

Galen Strawson is very fond of pointing out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes. He is also very good at doing so. Time and again throughout his career, mapped out by the essays contained in this volume, he has drawn attention to an assumption or a view so familiar that philosophers had forgotten that it was possible to question it, and he has said ‘Hold on, why do we believe that, again?’. Some examples: (i) the assumption, at one time fashionable in a wide range of disciplines, that a human being is essentially a creature which experiences its life as some kind of narrative or story, and that doing so is somehow an essential part of the human good; (ii) the once unquestioned interpretation of David Hume as a regularity theorist about causation; (iii) the orthodox view that our phenomenal states can be considered in isolation from our

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