Things That Bother Me

<b>An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson's writings on the self and consciousness naturalism and pan-psychism.</b> <p/>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 <i>Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name</i>) 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. <p/>Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.