Galen Strawson > Quotes

“It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument—their intellect—which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.”
― Galen Strawson

“I find philosophy—philosophy in the largest sense—a profoundly concrete, sensual activity. I know others who feel the same. The world of ideas seems as solid as the world of seas and mountains—or more so. One can no more change its topography than one can move Samarqand closer to Bukhara, although one can discover new views or discover that one has gotten the topography wrong, or that many people have for many years. Ideas seem as embodied, in the world of ideas, with its views and obstructions and vastness, as we do in our material world. They seem tangible, with specific savors, aesthetic properties, emotional tones, curves, surfaces, insides, hidden places, structure, geometry, dark passages, shining corners, auras, force fields, and combinatorial chemistry. This is one great reason why “travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy,” as Bertrand Russell said, and why “it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored.”
― Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.

“The trouble is I have the religious temperament but I don't have the belief.”
― Galen Strawson

“By the “sense of the self ” I mean—at least—the sense that people have of themselves as being, specifically, a mental presence, a mental someone, a mental locus of awareness, conscious mental subject that is distinct from all its particular experiences, thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings, and so on. This sense of self comes to every normal human being, in some form, in childhood.”
― Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.