"Consciousness, thank goodness, is no longer a forbidden topic, and Galen Strawson's complex, subtle and controversial book is one of the best of many trying to say how we should think about this most difficult of subjects. . . . The chief critical portion of this book comprises what is perhaps the most detailed and convincing refutation of behaviorism given yet in philosophy."
-- Times Literary Supplement

"A careful, sensitive and imaginative treatment of some of the main conceptual questions that condition any approach to the nature of mind."
-- Colin McGinn, Nature

What is distinctive of the mental? In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that the answer is not intelligence, representational content, or intentionality broadly understood, but conscious experience. Strawson challenges neobehaviorist accounts of the mental. He argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind is still confused by positivism and its various offspring. It gives undue primacy of place to nonmental phenomena, publicly observable phenomena, and behavioral phenomena in its account of the nature of mind. Strawson describes an alternative position, naturalized Cartesianism, that couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with respect for the idea that the only distinctively mental phenomena are those of conscious experience.

Representation and Mind series