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“... à mon pote Jules merde en croûte, merde en daube, merde du pays, merde d’antan. merde de province, pâté de merde, folie de merde (merde boulangère). merde Chantilly, merde de Paris, merde anglaise, putain de merde. merde longue durée, merde d’occasion, merde maison, merdorama! merde d’Auvergne, merde de Brest, merde de souche, merde magnanime ...”

“... Six is a ‘perfect number’ – it’s the sum of its divisors, 3, 2 and 1 – and it’s favoured for that reason by Azarya Sheiner, a six-year-old mathematical genius who is the central attractor, but not the protagonist, of Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Twenty-eight is the next perfect number (divisors 14, 7, 4, 2, 1), and 28 arguments for the existence of God might have been more than enough ...”

“... According to the traditions of the Prophet reported by Al Bukhari, Muhammad once declared that those who would be most severely punished on the Day of Judgment were the ‘portrayers’ (al musawwirun), the painters or sculptors. No doubt he was principally concerned to condemn the evil of idolatry, like Moses before him and many after him. But Islamic religious art has ever since avoided all representation of living creatures, and above all of people ...”

“... Is it true that humiliation, shame and embarrassment are ‘the central emotions of everyday social existence’? It is not obviously false. To say that these emotions are central is not to say that they are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller’s suggestion has a creeping plausibility – in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home ...”

“... What does it take​ for a person in 2015 to be the same person as she was in 1995 and will be in 2035? This is the question of personal identity, a question about persistence through time, or ‘diachronic’ identity. It seems enough at first to say that the person is the same in 2015 as in 1995 and in 2035 just so long as she is the same living human animal, the same biological organism (same passport, same national insurance number, same DNA ...”

“... According to the ‘analytic’ tradition, modern philosophy begins with Descartes (b. 1596), Spinoza (b. 1632), Locke (b. 1632), Leibniz (b. 1646), Berkeley (b. 1685), Hume (b. 1711) and Kant (b. 1724). This is the canonical list of great philosophers, and it is not very likely to change. But there are two others whose claims for inclusion are regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b ...”

“... Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this strange part of the park. I don’t, however, agree with his reasons or share his motive for attempting to explain how we can survive death, and I doubt the necessity of some of the matériel in his admittedly fabulous argumentative armamentarium ...”

“... I’m a naturalist, an out-and-out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist, a naturalist about concrete reality. I don’t think anything supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. You can’t classify anything as supernatural or non-natural until you have a substantive conception of the natural in relation to which something can be classified as non-natural ...”

“... Human beings in different cultures are much more alike, psychologically speaking, than most anthropologists and sociologists suppose. There’s a great deal of substance to the idea of a common humanity – of profound emotional and cognitive similarities that transcend differences in cultural experience. It’s also true that human beings are very varied, psychologically, but the deepest psychological differences are those that can be found within a given culture ...”

“... out views with which one disagrees, and does so with exemplary clarity and sophistication. For me, Galen Strawson’s Mental Reality is such a book, and any contemporary course of lectures on the philosophy of mind would be well advised to discuss it: the issues it deals with are important ones, and what Strawson has to ...”

“... conclusions from epistemological premises: ‘if no ideas then no reality’. Now here comes Galen Strawson to argue that Hume has been grievously misrepresented all along: for the real David Hume never denied the objective reality of causal necessity. He firmly believed in it. And so Hume’s reputation is set to rise high again. He did not, after ...”

“... being, and not anything else, that is the subject of all your experiences, thoughts and feelings. Galen Strawson’s book Selves, a work of shameless metaphysics, argues that selves exist and that they are not human beings. However, Strawson is a materialist and does not think that your self could exist apart from your ...”

“... has mostly fallen out of fashion. I won’t dwell on it here. That, then, sets the stage for Galen Strawson’s Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, which consists of a lead essay by Strawson, commentaries by 18 other philosophers, and Strawson’s extensive comments on the ...”

“... This is another of those mind-bendingly basic philosophical questions, and it is the subject of Galen Strawson’s Freedom and Belief, an often interesting and very involved exploration of the positive content and internal incoherence of our natural sense of ourselves (from the inside) as free and responsible agents. No one could accuse ...”

“... as a system of ideas and nobody thinks it’s ideological. In Things that Bother Me (2018), Galen Strawson argues with a brisk Oxfordian common sense that there are narrative people and non-narrative ones. Some of us see our lives as a story and some of us don’t. He might have added that there are those who have some narrational days and some ...”