Galen Strawson

Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me will be published this month.

Letter
I’m not sure why Jonathan Parry’s reference to Lord Northcliffe’s appointment as ‘director of propaganda in Enemy Countries’ led me to look up ‘propaganda’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it seems worthwhile, in these verbally mephitic times, and because mistakes in the OED are surely vanishingly rare, to point out that its definition is wrong. It reads: ‘The systematic dissemination...
Letter

The Coo Situation

4 March 2021

I was very touched by Michael Hofmann’s poem ‘H.H., 95’ (LRB, 4 March). It was full of familiarities that I find somewhat alarming. It may be, though, that his wood pigeons (‘The gaspy whistle of wood pigeons’ wings/and their little-brained Roo-coo-coo/anaesthetises another summer’) are in fact, and in spite of their wings, collared doves, more delicate creatures, and relatively recent...
Letter
A number of people have expressed puzzlement about the title of my poem ‘After Flaubert’ (LRB, 8 March). I shouldn’t have omitted the epigraph, a deeply characteristic comment from Flaubert’s letters (which are, arguably, his greatest achievement): ‘De quelque côté qu’on pose les pieds on marche sur la merde’ (to Louise Colet, Saturday, midnight, Croisset, 29-30 January 1853).
Letter

Easy Peasy

17 June 2015

According to Peter Green’s Homer, quoted by Colin Burrow, Achilles’ spear ‘stuck in the ground, after breaking through both layers of [Aeneas’] sheltering shield’ (LRB, 18 June). I take it that the spear is also stuck in the shield, and that no great textual difficulty is created by the fact that Poseidon later pulls it out. Certainly Aeneas is no longer holding the shield. He’s picking...
Letter

Mistakes

18 April 1996

Abridgment of my piece on ‘The Sense of the Self’ (LRB, 18 April) produced an error. The sentence ‘The ordinary notion of what a subject of experience is seems pretty clear: it is being one and being self-conscious’ is multiply false. For one thing, self-consciousness is not a necessary condition of being a subject of experience: anything that can feel pain is a subject of experience. The most...

The I in Me: I and Me

Thomas Nagel, 5 November 2009

What are you, really? To the rest of the world you appear as a particular human being, a publicly observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself,...

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Headaches have themselves

Jerry Fodor, 24 May 2007

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe...

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What-it’s-like-ness

Hilary Putnam, 8 February 1996

Every so often one encounters a book with which one disagrees, wholly or in large part, but which one regards as a genuine contribution to philosophy precisely because it sets out views with...

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Reputation

Colin McGinn, 23 November 1989

Philosophical reputations come and go – they surge and gutter – according largely to the prevailing intellectual climate, and are only tenuously tied to the actual merits of the views...

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Is that you, James?

Thomas Nagel, 1 October 1987

Your nervous system is as complex a physical object as there is in the universe, so far as we know: 12 billion cells, each of them a complex structure with up to sixty thousand synaptic points of...

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