PEL Presents Closereads: Galen Strawson on Panpsychism (Part One)

On "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2008). Strawson argues that physicalism should not just be taken as matter in motion. Instead, the physical is a broader category that includes not just chairs and molecules, but also "my experience of red." Yet he's not trying to say that experiences are just brain states; they clearly include qualia (what it's like to experience red). And he's also not just trying to solve the problem by redefining "physical" to include "mental" (though he is doing that).

Instead, he's claiming that we have no warrant to claim that the properties of the physical are exhausted by what third-person science can investigate, and that we can't solve the mind-body problem unless we posit that (at least some) physical objects have a mental aspect. Sounds like Spinoza to us!

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