Reduction and the self

Galen Strawson's keynote paper (1997) offers us one way of modelling the self, one that starts from the phenomenology of the sense of self and derives from that metaphysical conclusions about the nature of the self. Strawson is surely correct to hold that phenomenological considerations cannot be ignored in thinking about the metaphysics of the self. I am not as convinced as he is, however, that phenomenology is the royal road to metaphysics. What I want to sketch out in this short paper is another approach to the metaphysics of the self, one that is driven by reductivist concerns. As far as I can see it is an open question whether there are any global points of disagreement between us (although there are certainly some local ones).