Thomas Nagel writes:

‘Philosophy, like science,’ says Strawson, ‘aims to say how things are in reality, and conflict with ordinary thought and language is no more an objection to a philosophical theory than a scientific one.’ Yet his conclusions depart so far from the idea most people have of themselves that it seems natural to describe him as offering not a theory of the self, but rather the view that there is no such thing as the self, distinct from the human being. If he is right, there are only human beings, who persist in time, and who undergo a constantly changing sequence of experiences, each having the irreducible character of subjectivity. He asks us to give up the powerful conviction that the I who is the subject of my present experience has existed for a long time, that it was also the subject of the experiences I remember from the past, and that it will be the subject of the experiences that the human being who I am will undergo in the future. At the very least, we are convinced that this could be the case, so that it must make sense.

(LRB 5 November 2009)

Oxford | hardback 448 pp. |ISBN: 9780198250067