Organon F 27 (4) 2020: 588–594 ISSN 2585-7150 (online) https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2020.27410 ISSN 1335-0668 (print) * John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin  Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Raclawickie 14, PL 20-950 Lublin, Poland  jacekjarocki@kul.pl © The Author. Journal compilation © The Editorial Board, Organon F. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attri- bution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0). BOOK REVIEW Galen Strawson: Things That Bother Me. Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. New York: New York Review Books, 2018, 240 pages Jacek Jarocki* Galen Strawson is certainly one of the most original contemporary philoso- phers. And he has—perhaps as every original philosopher has—given rise to many controversies. The theories he defends, such as panpsychism or the con- ception of sesmets—extremely short-lived selves—may indeed prompt an ‘in- credulous stare’ (as Peter van Inwagen once observed) and are usually rejected by philosophical orthodoxy. But this, often too hasty, criticism causes Strawson to express his views even more boldly; it is not surprising, then, that his thinking might be seen as lifelong training in philosophical rebellion. It is for that very reason that Things That Bother Me is so important. It enables one to under- stand that his motives are in fact quite the opposite: Strawson turns out to be a humanist, concerned with the sempiternal questions that strike every clever man. The book consists of nine popular papers, i.e. meant for non-philosophers. The first, ‘The Sense of the Self,’ is the oldest one—it was written in 1996. Its main subject, clearly stated in the title, is the phenomenology of the self: the way we feel our inner I. Strawson mentions seven features that ‘capture the core of the ordinary human sense of the self’ (p. 30). However, not all of them are parts of a genuine experience of ourselves; and in some cases, features such as personality, activity and long-term continuity are absent. This ‘thinned’ sense of the self involves being a thing, being something mental, being subject of experience, singleness and distinctiveness. The vast part of this chapter is de- voted to familiarising readers with the idea that longevity of the self—a feature that seems essential to many of us—might not be (and, indeed, is not to some)