Individuals By Pf Strawson Pdf

Peter Frederick Strawson (1919–2006) was an Oxford-basedphilosopher whose career spanned the second half of the twentiethcentury. He wrote most notably about the philosophy of language,metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, especiallyKant.

Strawson’s basic assumption is that we have no choice but toemploy the core concepts of common-sense, those of body, person, spaceand time, causation, and also those of meaning, reference and truth.Their applicability does not have to be earned by a reduction to asupposedly more basic and secure realm of concepts, such as those ofexperience as conceived of by the empiricists, or those of science.There is no more basic or secure level of thought. He maintained, invarious ways, that sceptical challenges to these categories arespurious and unwarranted. According to Strawson the proper task ofmetaphysics is to describe these indispensable notions and theirinterconnections. He opposed philosophical theories of language, suchas Russell’s or Davidson’s, as he interpreted it, whichoverestimate the degree to which ordinary language is akin to formallanguages, and he also opposed sceptical attitudes to the notions ofmeaning and truth along the lines developed by Quine and Dummett.Within Oxford, Strawson contributed in a major way to the weakening ofAustin’s influence and helped to re-establish there anengagement with abstract philosophical questions. The range andquality of Strawson’s writings made him one of the majorphilosophers in the period in which he lived, and his work stillattracts considerable attention.

• 8. Some Themes in Strawson’s Writings
• Bibliography

1. Life

Peter Frederick Strawson was born, in London, on November 23, 1919. Hestudied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at St. John’sCollege, Oxford, between 1937 and 1940. His philosophy tutors wereJ.D. Mabbott, an eminent political philosopher, later to become Masterof the college, and H. P. Grice, whom Strawson himself described as‘one of the cleverest and most ingenious thinkers of ourtime’. (This quotation comes from Strawson’s‘Intellectual Autobiography’ contained in Hahn 1998.Strawson’s account there of his life and thought contains muchthat is of philosophical interest, and it also reveals much about himas a person.) Strawson was then called up for military service andbelongs to that generation of British philosophers, including Ayer,Hampshire, Hare, Hart and Wollheim, who saw service in the SecondWorld War. His first post after the war was at Bangor, in Wales, but,after winning the prestigious John Locke Prize in Oxford (a prizeawarded on the basis of a written examination to philosophy graduatesin Oxford) he received an appointment at University College, Oxford,which made him a Fellow in 1948. Two years later, in 1950, with thepublication of ‘On Referring’ in Mind and hisdebate with Austin about truth, he achieved international fame.

May 24, 2017  Within personal relationships between individuals. This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. PF Strawson, Individuals, p 99; Presupposition Failure and the Assertive Enterprise. The reader should consult the EU risk assessment report. Nelson DM, Kline JR, Gustafson PF. Moral Responsibility: Justifying Strawson and the Excuse of Peculiarly Unfortunate Formative Circumstances. First published: 'Persons' by P. Strawson, Minnesota. Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume ll, edited. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover.

His subsequent life as a philosopher was spent mostly in positions atOxford, first as a Fellow at University College, and then, after 1968,as Gilbert Ryle’s successor as Wayneflete Professor ofMetaphysical Philosophy, at Magdalen College. Writing extensively, inboth books and articles, about the philosophy of language,metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy, he succeededin redirecting Oxford philosophy away from the limitations which hadto some extent been accepted under the influence of Austin, towards are-engagement with some traditional and also some new abstractphilosophical issues. He established from the early 1950s onwards apre-eminence within Oxford philosophy, both through his publicationsbut also by his quite exceptional critical abilities. Part of the waythat Strawson’s approach to philosophy contrasted withAustin’s is that Strawson was committed to the value ofpublication, of books and articles, whereas Austin seemed content todevelop his views and promulgate them in lectures and talks.Simultaneously, Strawson established himself as one of the leadingphilosophers in the world. His achievements were recognised byelection in 1960 to the British Academy, the reception of a knighthoodin 1977, and by many other honours. In 1998 he became the twenty sixthphilosopher to have a volume devoted to him in the famous Library ofLiving Philosophers series, adding another British name to the list ofrecipients of this honour, previous ones being Whitehead, Russell,Moore, Broad and Ayer. He was probably the most famous and mostdiscussed British philosopher within the academic world of philosophyfrom the 1950s until the late 1980s. His status is evidenced by thefact that his writings attracted the attention of, and were discussedby, the world’s leading philosophers, including, Russell,Sellars, Putnam, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke.

Strawson was married and had four children. He was a highly culturedman, with a passion for literature, especially poetry, large amountsof which he could recite and which he also wrote. In conversation,manners and appearance, the overwhelming impression was of eleganceand effortless intelligence.

Strawson retired in 1987, but remained philosophically active untilhis death, in Oxford, on February 13, 2006.

2. Reference

Strawson published ‘On Referring’ in 1950. (Like Frege,Russell and, later, Kripke, and Evans, Strawson made his name by writing aboutreference.) He subsequently modified and developed his views onreference, but the central claim of ‘On Referring’ issomething he always defended. Strawson’s title contains, ofcourse, an allusion to Russell’s famous article ‘OnDenoting’, the central idea of which Strawson is criticising.Strawson’s conception of the debate is that Russell offered histheory of descriptions as a complete account of the role of definitedescriptions in English (such expressions as ‘the queen ofEngland’), whereas the truth is that the role of the word‘the’ when embedded in definite descriptions cannot becaptured in a single account. There are uses which Russell’stheory does not fit because the phenomenon is simply more complex thanRussell allowed. It is not, therefore, that Strawson is offering hisown complete theory; it is, rather, that he is picking out uses forwhich, according to him, Russell’s theory fails, andcharacterising them. Russell’s theory had achieved the status oforthodoxy at the time that Strawson launched his attack on it. Thatthis is the way to understand Strawson’s contribution to thedebate has the important consequence that it is no objection to hisapproach to point to uses of ‘the’ about which, arguably,Russell (or something close to Russell’s view) might be correct.Such points do not touch Strawson’s central claim. Thisundermines a number of responses to Strawson. Strawson’s paperinitiated a debate about definite descriptions that has run ever sinceits publication, and in which his views have remained central.

Russell claimed that a sentence of the form ‘The F isG’ says; ‘There is one and only one Fand it is G.’ The difference from ‘An Fis G’ is that the latter merely claims that there isa (G) F, whereas the use of the definitearticle imports the extra claim of uniqueness. Both are alike inmaking an existential claim about Fs, namely, there is anF, and hence, according to Russell, at least part of the roleof ‘the’ is to be (or to introduce) what is called anexistential quantifier. This, in a crude presentation, isRussell’s Theory of Definite Descriptions. Against this Strawsonargued, first, that it is unsupported. He claimed that Russell’smain support for his theory is that a sentence such as ‘The kingof France is bald’ remains meaningful even though there is noking of France. Its having meaning cannot, therefore, depend on therebeing a referent for the apparent subject expression. According toStrawson, Russell infers from that to the conclusion that the semanticrole of the apparent subject expression in such sentences (i.e.‘the F’) cannot be to refer to or designate anobject, and must, rather, function as a quantifier. Against thisStrawson suggested that the meaningfulness of ‘The F isG’ should be thought of as, roughly, there being rulesas to what a use of the sentence in different circumstances willamount to. If the circumstances are right then it can be used in areferring way, if they are not then the use might not succeed in beingan act of reference. Strawson’s distinction between asentence’s having a meaning and the speech act performed by itsuse on an occasion is clearly sound and important. One question thatwas debated is whether Russell’s reasons for his theory are alldisarmed by the introduction of that distinction.

However, against the Russellian theory itself Strawson made theimportant point that the theory implies that a sentence of the form‘The F is G’ must count as false whenused in circumstances where there is no F. (These cases areoften described as ones involving ‘reference failure’). Itmust do so because, according to the theory, part of the role of‘The F’ (at least in such declarative sentences)is to say that there is an F. Contrary to this, Strawsonclaims that we would not always regard a saying of ‘TheF is G’ as false in such circumstances. Wewould not react by saying ‘That is false’ but would rathersay something like ‘What do you mean?’ or ‘You mustbe under a misapprehension’. He suggested that in suchcircumstances the use amounts neither to saying something true nor tosaying something false. It exhibits what came to be called a‘truth-value gap’. In subsequent discussion it becameclear, not that this criticism is definitely mistaken, but that it isdifficult to determine what the truth value of sentences involvingreferential failure actually is. Strawson’s main objection toRussell’s account is, though, that it is simply obvious thatsometimes we use ‘The F’ to refer to or pick outan object, and we do not then use it to say that there is anF.

Strawson’s attitude is well presented in a later important paperwhere he says:

The distinction between identifying reference and uniquely existentialassertion is something quite undeniable. The sense in which theexistence of something answering to a definite description used forthe purpose of identifying reference, and its distinguishability by anaudience from anything else, is presupposed and not asserted in anutterance containing such an expression, so used, stands absolutelyfirm, whether or not one opts for the view that radical failure of thepresupposition would deprive the statement of a truth-value. Itremains a decisive objection to the theory of Descriptions …that … it amounts to a denial of these undeniable distinctions.(Strawson 1964, 85)

This passage reveals four important aspects of Strawson’sapproach to definite descriptions. The first is that his fundamentalobjection to Russell is that it is simply obvious to him as asensitive and self-reflective user of language that the use of theword ‘the’ does not conform to the theory. Whateverpuzzles there may be about language and reference their solutioncannot require us to deny such obvious facts. It is a recurring themein, or perhaps a recurring part of the method of, Strawson’sphilosophical discussion of language that some aspects of language aremore or less obvious to us. Second, the contrast that strikes Strawsonas especially obvious is that between saying that there is(one and only one) F and employing the definite description‘The F’ in certain contexts. If, standing infront of our familiar car, I say to my family, ‘The car will notstart’, I am hardly telling them that we have, or there is, acertain car. Why should I engage in a communicative act of that sort?It is the importance of this contrast that impressed Strawson, asopposed to the problem often now raised against Russell’stheory, that the uniqueness commitment seems equally problematic.Strawson notes the issue about uniqueness but attends most to theassertion of existence problem. This reading of the nature ofStrawson’s main objection to Russell implies that a crucialquestion is whether it is an implication of Russell’s analysisthat the person employing the description ‘The F’(in normal discourse) says that there is one (and only one)F. If that is not an implication of Russell’s analysisthen Strawson’s main objection lapses. It might be also askedwhether there must be any such problematic implication of analyses ofdescriptions in terms of quantifiers conceived in a more sophisticatedway that emerged only after Russell wrote. Third, one central conceptin Strawson’s developed description of the role of such anexpression as ‘The F’ is that it can be a devicefor what he calls identifying reference. Roughly, Strawson’sidea is that the definite description is sometimes chosen to enablethe audience to fix on or pick out as the subject matter of the claiman item of which they already know. In this role it cannot be that‘the F’ tells them of the existence of such anF, since its role rests on the prior existence of suchknowledge. Strawson provides a detailed analysis of this function inthe first chapter of Individuals, as well as in the articlefrom which the quotation above comes. Finally, a notion that Strawsonintroduced in his own description of the nature of definitedescriptions and which surfaces in the quotation is that ofpresupposition. Strawson said that the use of a definitedescription standardly presupposes the existence of an object fittingthe description even though it does not say, nor therefore entail,that there is such an object. This concept met with resistance amongstphilosophers but has had a colossal influence on linguists, who havetended to see it as a useful concept in the description of language(see Huang 2007, ch. 7). This encourages us to ask whether it is morelikely that linguists or philosophers have the better insight intolanguage.

3. Truth

The other very important debate that Strawson was involved in theearly 1950s was that with Austin about truth. Viewed in terms of thepolitics of Oxford philosophy at that time the debate perhapsrepresents a power struggle between Austin, the hitherto acknowledgedleader and Strawson the younger challenger. Philosophically, Strawsontook exception to Austin’s attempt (in Austin 1950) to formulatea reconstructed version of the correspondence theory of truth.Austin’s account of truth is complex, but, roughly, he held thatin saying that a statement is true one is saying that the state ofaffairs which a particular kind of linguistic convention, which hecalled the referential conventions, ensure are picked out by the useof the original sentence in the given circumstances, satisfy theconditions which another sort of convention — called thedescriptive conventions — target the rest of the sentence onto.Austin’s idea can be illustrated with an example. The sentence‘The television is broken’ is governed by certainreferential conventions which target it onto some state of affairs inthe world involving a particular television set and there are alsocertain descriptive conventions built into the sentence linking it toa type of state of affairs (the containing-a-broken-television type)and the former state of affairs conforms to, or falls under, thedescriptively correlated type. Strawson, in criticism, principallyalleges that Austin had no clear conception of what the supposedreferential conventions link sentences with. Is it objects — saythe television? But if it is an object then that is not a state ofaffairs, and certainly not a fact. Strawson also argues that facts andstates of affairs should not be regarded as things in the world. Hesuggests that we employ such nouns as ‘fact’ and‘state of affairs’ as non-referential devices forexpressing claims. Thus, I can say ‘It is a fact thatP’ instead of simply saying ‘P’,but the former remark in no way introduces an entity beyond anythingintroduced in the second claim. (This might be labelled a redundancytheory of facts.) Having queried the ontology ofAustin’s account, Strawson, somewhat surprisingly seems preparedto allow that the conditions that Austin’s account incorporatesare, in effect, correlated with the truth of the sentence inquestion, but, he says, the fulfilment of these conditions is not whatwe are claiming to obtain when we say that it is true. It issimply obvious that remarks about truth are not remarks aboutlinguistic conventions. This criticism seems to have a similar statusto the central criticism of Russell. Strawson’s point againstAustin is that it is simply obvious that the theory cannot be correctbecause it is obvious to us as language users that when we speak oftruth we are not talking about such things as referential (anddescriptive) linguistic conventions. Finally, Strawson pointed outthat Austin’s account could only apply to a limited range ofstatements. If I say ‘There are no unicorns’ what are thereferential targets of my remark?

Strawson’s criticisms were taken by most people to have fatallywounded Austin’s theory. The subsequent discussion occasioned bytheir debate primarily concerned some issues about the degree to whichStrawson’s criticisms as a whole were fair to Austin, and alsowhether the approach to truth that Strawson himself favoured wasadequate. Strawson’s, rather than Austin’s account, becamethe focus of debate. Strawson himself returned to the former questionin later articles, arguing persuasively that even on the mostcharitable interpretation Austin’s idea of two sorts ofconventions cannot be made sense of. Strawson himself favoured a viewwhich took as the central insight about truth (one deriving from F. P.Ramsey) that to say that P is true is equivalent to saying that P.Strawson’s own main contribution to working out this idea was tostress, even though changing his mind about how strongly to stress,the linguistic acts that the word ‘true’ enables us toperform. This leaves Strawson free to point out that even ifRamsey’s equivalence is the fundamental core of the notion oftruth, it would not follow that the expression ‘true’ is aredundant expression. The presence in our language of the term‘true’ might be of great, indeed, indispensable,utility.

G. J. Warnock (in Warnock 1964) thought he discerned a problem inStrawson’s account because the theory might not allow that insaying that a certain remark is true a speaker is saying somethingabout that remark, which Warnock thought a desirable element in anaccount of truth. Rather, Warnock felt that according to Strawson thespeaker is simply saying the same as the original remark. In hisresponse Strawson pointed out that it is possible to incorporatereference to the statement in the analysis he gave of truthascriptions. Thus, the claim ‘John’s statement thatP is true’ can be treated as equivalent to (say)‘P, as John’s statement said’. This isingenious, but it leaves one aspect of Strawson’s viewunexplained, and it may have been this aspect that Warnock was tryingto home in on. Strawson stressed that it was statements that weretruth bearers. If, however, truth should not be thought of as aproperty of anything, then what is the point of carefully identifyingthe things that are its bearers? (On some of these issues, see Searle1998.)

4. Logical Theory

Strawson published his first book An Introduction to LogicalTheory in 1952. In it Strawson attempts to explain the nature,and the scope and limits, of formal logic. The eminence he had alreadyachieved was reflected in the fact that it received a review by Quinein Mind. Strawson’s aim, generated in part by hisreflections on the correct treatment of definite descriptions, is tosay what formal logic is by explaining and elucidating its centralconcepts. One of these is the notion of entailment. Strawson favoursexplaining ‘P entails Q’ as‘‘P and not Q’ isself-contradictory’, and explains or elucidates the notion ofself-contradiction in terms of sentences saying nothing, in effect,they give and then take back simultaneously. Strawson then looks atthe notion of form and of proof systems. He applies his ideas totraditional syllogistic logic as well as to modern propositional andpredicate logic. It can be wondered how far his elucidation of thecentral notions is adequate, and it can also be wondered whether heattends to all the notions that need explanation in relation to formallogic (e.g., consistency and completeness). The main part of his bookdoes not seem to have had a large influence on philosophers orlogicians. However, three elements in his discussion had and continueto have considerable influence. He gave a fuller explanation of thenotion of presupposition than he had previously provided. Second,Strawson asked how far the meaning of ordinary language connectives,such as ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘if …then…’, can be equated with those of the truth functionalconnectives, such as ‘&’, ‘∨’, and‘→’, that logicians employ. Strawson argued thatthere are significant differences. His conclusion is that theseordinary expressions do not have what might be called a precise logic.The question that Strawson asked has continued to be central in thephilosophy of language, and there has been no resolution of it. Gricetook an opposite view to Strawson and part of the point of his accountof implication, as opposed to meaning or saying, was to generate anexplanation for the data that Strawson appealed to in arguing for asemantic difference between ordinary language and formal logic,without having to postulate a semantic difference. Strawson himselflater criticised Grice’s theory, at least in relation toconditionals. This debate is still very active. The third element wasthe approach to the problem of induction that Strawson proposed in thefinal chapter. We shall describe that later when looking atStrawson’s contribution to epistemology.

5. Individuals

In 1959 Strawson published his second book Individuals. It isambitious, abstract, wide ranging and original, and it has continuedto be read and discussed, especially the first half. Strawson coinedthe terms ‘descriptive metaphysics’ to capture his taskand opposed that to what he called ‘revisionarymetaphysics’. By using ‘metaphysics’ Strawson wasprimarily emphasising the abstractness and generality of hisquestions. A consequence of this generality, Strawson suggests, isthat the methods needed for settling the questions are different inkind from those employed in debating less abstract conceptual orphilosophical questions. One such method, employed in chapter 2, whenexploring the sound world, involves imagining creatures with quitedifferent experiences to our own, and trying to determine theircapacities for thinking about objects. By calling it‘descriptive’ Strawson means, in part, that he is notrecommending revisions or additions to how we think, but the term alsosignals Strawson’s conviction that there is a shared anduniversal conceptual scheme which we human beings have, and know thatwe have, and for which no justification in terms of more fundamentalconcepts or claims can be given. He writes:

[T]here is a massive central core of human thinking which has nohistory—or none recorded in histories of human thought; thereare categories and concepts which, in their most fundamentalcharacter, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialitiesof the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the leastrefined thinking; and yet are the indispensable core of the conceptualequipment of the most sophisticated human beings. (Strawson 1959, 10)

The claim that there are a shared set of concepts which are at theindispensable core of human thinking is a recognisably Kantian thesis.(We say more about Strawson’s relation to Kant below.) Descriptivemetaphysics aims to describe and analyse this universal conceptualscheme. In particular, Strawson aims to focus on one part ofthat total structure, namely our ability to direct our thoughts, andspeech, onto items in the world. It is possible therefore to seeIndividuals as, in part, a development of Strawson’sinterest in reference.

Individuals is very much a book of two halves. In the firstfour chapters Strawson’s focus is on our ability to refer to andthink about items in our environment, including ourselves. In thesecond part, again of four chapters, the aim is to elucidate thedistinction between subject expressions and predicate expressions.This latter task belongs more to philosophical logic or the philosophyof language than metaphysics, but the link is, according to Strawson,that the central cases of subject expressions are those picking outthe entities to which we basically refer, the character of which ithas been the task of the first half to determine. Since, in fact, thebook’s colossal and immediate impact was due primarily to thebrilliance and originality of its first three chapters, we shalldescribe them in somewhat more detail than the rest of the book. Thetruth is that reading the argument developed in those chaptersgenerates a continuous intellectual excitement, which the laterchapters do not quite match. It is also true that issues to do withthe subject-predicate distinction appeal to fewer people than do theissues focused on in the early part.

Chapter 1 focuses on the question of whether there is a category ofentities which we can think about without depending on thought aboutentities of other categories. The focus initially is not so much onthought as on linguistically referring to something when inconversation with an audience, and Strawson clarifies the relevantidea of talking about an item by invoking the notion of identifyingreference which emerged in his theory of reference. Strawson proposesthe following model of latching onto an identifying reference. Onecase is where the referent is picked out as a currently perceived item– say, this page. In such a case the audience succeedswhen they pick out the same item in their own field of experience. Theother is where it is picked out as falling under a description.Strawson’s idea is that ultimately such descriptions need torelate the item in some way to currently perceived items – say,as the author of this page – for otherwise thepossibility of reduplication would prevent us from picking out aunique item. (Such a two–fold structure of thought was alsoaccepted by Russell, but arguments in the theory of perceptionpersuaded him that the perceived scene was private rather than, asStrawson holds, public.)

How should we think of these descriptive relations? Strawson claims inchapter 1 that these descriptive relations are fundamentallyspatio-temporal. That is, my ability to think of James I rests onthinking of him as the person ascending the throne in 1603, thepresent time being 2018. Ultimately I fix on him via his place in aspatio-temporal framework which is centred on my currently perceivedenvironment. Strawson further points out that since we need to updatethis relational framework over time as we move around, we need to beable to re-identify objects and places encountered at different times.Strawson draws an epistemological conclusion from this. Since ourability to maintain a grasp on the spatio-temporal framework dependson acceptance of such identifications it is incoherent to be scepticalabout the procedures we rely on to confirm them while still thinkingin terms of the spatio-temporal framework itself. With theseconclusions in place, Strawson returns to his fundamental question asto whether there is a basic category of items of reference. Some formsof reference seem parasitic on other forms of reference: reference totheoretical entities is dependent on reference to materialparticulars; reference to experiences, such as Mary’s pain in herleg, are dependent on references to their subjects. Strawson’sassumption seems to be that putting these two categories to one sideleaves us with two candidates for the basic items of reference:material bodies (in a broad sense) and occurrences. Occurrences,however, cannot be basic since they too are standardly picked outdependently – e.g., the fire in that house – and,moreover, according to Strawson, they do not form a structuredframework allowing the spatio-temporal framework to be grounded. ThusStrawson’s conclusion: bodies (in a fairly inclusive sense) arereferentially basic.

Strawson next asks, in chapter 2, whether it is possible that thereshould be a conceptual scheme that acknowledges the existence ofobjective particulars but in which material bodies are not the basicparticulars. Since, according to the initial argument, referentialthought rests on a spatio-temporal framework only if it rests onthought about bodies, this question becomes: can there be thoughtabout objective entities which doesn’t involve thinking of them inspatial terms? To investigate this question, Strawson considerswhether the notion of an objective particular would be comprehensibleto a creature with only auditory experience, the assumption being thatauditory experience on its own is non-spatial and thus that a creaturein such a situation wouldn’t have access to spatial ways ofthinking. What objective notions would be available to such acreature? Strawson imaginatively enters into the sound world to seehow far ideas analogous to those that space makes available can befound. The best option relies on relating individual sounds to acontinuous ‘master sound’ which, as it were, definessomething analogous to space. Strawson himself appears to think thismight work. His view thus seems to be that although spatio-temporalthinking rests on bodies, objective thinking cannot be shown torequire spatio-temporal thinking per se, but even in cases where therecan be objective thought without spatio-temporal thinking, there mustbe something in in the subject’s way of thinking which performsa role analogous to the role that thought about space performs for us.Strawson’s argument was influentially discussed by Gareth Evans in‘Things Without the Mind’ (1980), a commentary on chapter 2 ofIndividuals; further commentary can be found in Snowdon 2006 andCassam 2005.

In the next chapter, entitled ‘Persons’, Strawson leavesbehind speculation about concepts based on attenuated experiences, andfocuses on our rich thought about ourselves. His argument involves acomparison between three conceptions of such thought. The first iswhat he calls the no-ownership view. This is the view that we do notreally refer to ourselves when we use the first-person pronoun, eventhough we seem to. There is nothing that owns or has the experiencesto which to refer. Strawson’s response is to argue that oncethis view is developed, genuine self-reference emerges as involved inthe theory’s explanation of the illusion of ownership ofexperiences. One question for this response is whether it is adecisive objection to the no-ownership theory that an incoherenceemerges in its standard explanation as to why we tend to believe thatour experiences are owned. Why must the no-ownership view supply suchan explanation? The second conception is that deriving from Descartes,according to which, the item that ‘I’ picks out issomething distinct from the physical body. Strawson argues that thisconception is incompatible with the principle that one can ascribeexperiences to oneself only if one is prepared to ascribe them toothers. This is because a subject can meet this requirement only ifthey are able to pick out other subjects, and, Strawson holds, onecannot pick out non-spatial subjects. Strawson concludes that when weself-refer we refer to an entity which has two sides or aspects, thephysical and the mental, and not to a thing which possesses only themental sort of feature, something else having the physical features.In effect, Strawson is representing ordinary thought as having thestructure of what others have called a dual-aspect theory. Persons arethings with two aspects – bodily and mental. He famouslydescribes this as the idea that the concept of a person is aprimitive concept. Second, since we can self-ascribe we mustbe able to other-ascribe, and that means that our methods for doing somust be adequate. As Strawson puts it, the criteria we employ forpsychological ascription to others must be ‘logicallyadequate’. There cannot, therefore, be a genuineproblem of other minds. Again, as in the first chapter, Strawsonderives a significant epistemological consequence from his conceptualinvestigations. This famous chapter has exercised a fascination onphilosophers thinking about ourselves and has been, perhaps, as muchdiscussed as any piece of philosophical argument that Strawson wrote.(For interesting discussion of this chapter see Ayer 1963, Martin1969, and Snowdon 2009.)

Finally, Strawson takes Leibniz as an opponent of some of hismajor theses and considers whether Leibniz might be able to avoid hisconclusions. He argues, displaying considerable ingenuity insuggesting different interpretations of Leibniz, that Leibniz does notescape the problems.

Individuals then shifts focus to the subject-predicatedistinction. Strawson’s initial aim is, in effect, to show thata novel theory is required. There are two reasons. First, we lack aproper explanation as to why absolutely anything can be the referenceof a subject expression but only universals can be what predicatesexpress. Second, he classifies the different accounts on offer andargues that they are either open to objection, or open to the demandfor further explanation. The contrast between subjects and predicatesthat Strawson himself proposes for the central cases is thatunderstanding a subject expression depends on the possession ofempirical information whereas the understanding of predicates doesnot. For example, to understand the name ‘James I’ I needto know something like; there was a king who ascended the throne in1603. But to understand the predicate ‘… istriangular’ there is no empirical information about the worldthat I need to grasp. There need not be, or have been, any trianglesat all. I have, rather, to grasp the principle of classificationlinked to the term. Strawson’s proposal is ingenious, but facesa number of questions. First, is it clear that all predicates expressprinciples of classification the grasp of which involves no empiricalknowledge? Consider such natural kind involving predicates as‘is gold’ or ‘is a dog’. Second, is it obviousthat understanding subject expressions requires accepting theempirical claims, as opposed to merely knowing what the assumptionsare? Third, what entitles Strawson to attach a priority within hisaccount to empirical claims? Why is non-empirical discourse, such asmathematics, to be regarded as secondary? Strawson then attempts toexplain some other elucidations of the subject-predicate distinctionas deriving from his own suggestion, and to develop a more generalcriterion on the basis of his own account having captured the corecases. In the next chapter Strawson asks the very interesting andnovel question whether, just as the employment of (the core type of)subject expressions presupposes empirical information, there is a typeof proposition the truth of which is presupposed by subject-predicatepropositions in general. He picks out what he callsfeature-placing sentences, such as ‘It israining’. Such a sentence does not designate an object anddescribe it, rather the sentence affirms the presence of a feature.Strawson argues that where there are true subject-predicatepropositions there must also be true feature-placing sentences. Thatis his answer to the question.

Individuals is far richer in argument than we have been ableto convey. It occasioned, more or less immediately, considerabledebate, and has continued to do so ever since. The epistemologicalconclusions that Strawson advanced, both about bodies and about otherminds, were closely scrutinized. The overall arguments of the chapteron persons and the chapter on bodies were closely analysed. Thecontrast between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, althoughbriefly presented by Strawson, entered into the folk taxonomy ofphilosophy. As well as occasioning disagreement, Strawson’s bookstimulated, over time, a series of books all of which could bedescribed as essays in descriptive metaphysics with a similar focusto, though not with identical conclusions to, Individuals.These include Gareth Evans’ The Varieties of Reference,John Campbell’s Past, Space and Self, and DavidWiggins, Sameness and Substance. (For a good general criticaldiscussion of Individuals see Williams 1961.)

6. The Bounds of Sense

In 1966, seven years after the publication of IndividualsStrawson published his third book, The Bounds of Sense,subtitled An essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Strawson’s introduction to Kant arose out of the historicalpeculiarities of Oxford’s degree in Philosophy, Politics andEconomics. At that time, the degree was structured such that therewere two special subjects which those who wished to specialise inphilosophy were obliged to take: Logic and Kant, the latter to bestudied through the Critique of Pure Reason and theGroundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Critique ofPure Reason, Strawson found ‘a depth, a range, a boldness, and apower unlike anything I had previously encountered’ (Strawson 2003,8).

Strawson lacks sympathy with Kant’s description of his task as theexplanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements. Hisapproach to the first Critique is instead captured by hischaracteristically elegant title which contains a three-fold pun.First, it is an echo of a title that Kant considered for the Critique.Second and third, it plays on the ambiguity of the word‘sense’ which can denote both sense-experience andsense-meaning. According to Strawson, Kant sets a lower limit onsense, arguing that ‘a certain minimal structure is essential toany conception of experience which we can make truly intelligible toourselves’ (1966, 11). And he sets an upper limit on sense,holding ‘that the attempt to extend beyond the limits ofexperience the use of structural concepts, or of any other concepts,leads only to claims empty of meaning’. Finally, he does all ofthis from ‘a point outside [the bounds of sense], a point which,if they are rightly drawn, cannot exist’ (1966, 12). This pointoutside the bounds of sense is Kant’s metaphysics of transcendentalidealism and the ‘imaginary subject of transcendentalpsychology’ (1966, 32). Strawson’s analytic project is toextract what is valuable of the first two strands from the supposedincoherence of the last.

With regards to the lower limit of sense and the constructive part ofthe first Critique, Strawson examines Kant’s argument thatour experience must be of recognisably independent objective items,which are spatial, temporal, and must satisfy some strong principlesof permanence and causation. Strawson argues, with both care andbrilliance, that Kant’s arguments are, in various ways,defective, but that somewhat weaker, but nonetheless important,conclusions along similar lines can be defended. The most fecund andbrilliant part of Strawson’s argument, and the part which hascorrespondingly attracted the most attention, is Strawson’s take onKant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in which Strawsonargues that ‘for a series of diverse experiences to belong to asingle consciousness it is necessary that they should be so connectedas to constitute a temporally extended experience of a unifiedobjective world’ (1966, 97). That is, the experience of aself-conscious creature must involve and be recognised as involvingperception of objects. Strawson’s reconstruction of the argumentrelies on the idea that the experiences of a self-conscious creaturemust provide room for the thought of experience itself. But one canapply that notion only in the context of the application of categoriesof things which are not experiences. However, such categories can beavailable to a subject only if its experiences provide it with thegrounds for applying them, which involves the idea that itsexperiences relate it to non-experiences, that is to say, independentthings. This argument is discussed in Rorty 1970, Harrison 1970, andGomes 2016.

With regards to the upper limit to sense and the destructive part ofthe first Critique, Strawson examines Kant’s arguments inthe Dialectic, and develops further requirements on our conception ofexperience analogous to those Kant advances. The discussion of theParalogisms is particularly important for Strawson, containing, as hesees it, a deep insight about the failures of Cartesian dualism. Kantdoesn’t combine, according to Strawson, this recognition of thefailures of dualism with a correspondingly accurate account ofourselves, but this failure is to be explained by Kant’stranscendental idealism, and once shorn of this theory, Kant’s viewis able to be supplemented with a plausible and realistic account ofourselves.

Finally, Strawson considers Kant’s transcendental idealism, andthough he is ultimately unsympathetic, he explores its interpretationwith great care and considers why Kant might have adopted it. Oneissue which he presses is whether there is a coherent way to fitourselves as objects into a framework of transcendental idealism,given Kant’s seeming view that real objects, things in themselves,are unknowable and beyond our experience. The rejection oftranscendental idealism requires Strawson to scrutinize Kant’sarguments for it, and he very carefully and sympathetically analysesand rejects Kant’s arguments about space and time, and geometry,and also the argument, presented in the Antinomies, thattranscendental realism generates contradictions. Strawson furtherabandons much of Kant’s talk of mechanisms of synthesis in thegeneration of proper experience. Much of Strawson’s discussionhere relies on his particular interpretation of transcendentalidealism which has been heavily criticised, for instance in Matthews1969.

The Bounds of Sense had an immediate impact and continues tobe extremely influential. Its interpretation of Kant quickly became atarget of discussion in Kant scholarship, and Strawson returned tosome issues of Kant interpretation in four essays which are collectedin Strawson 1997. But it also, as Putnam remarks, ‘opened theway to a reception of Kant’s philosophy by analyticphilosophers’ (Putnam 1998 in Hahn 1998, 273). One particularfocus has been on Strawson’s use of a style of argument which hetook Kant himself to have developed. These arguments have come to becalled ‘transcendental arguments’. In Individualsand The Bounds of Sense they take the form of uncoveringdependencies in our ways of thinking of the world. These dependenciescan be taken to have anti-sceptical implications if claims about whichthe sceptic is sceptical can be shown to be required for thejudgements which the sceptic makes, or ones which are involved in thesceptics’ own understanding of their view. In the years followingits publication this anti-sceptical response was closely investigated,a large literature on it was generated, including notably a number ofpowerful contributions by the American philosopher Barry Stroud. (SeeStroud 1968 and 2000.) One problem is that it is extraordinarilydifficult to show that there are the conceptual dependencies whichsuch transcendental arguments rely on. Interestingly, Strawson himselfsoon devised a different response to scepticism, but it is also truethat the anti-sceptical approach that Strawson developed here remainsappealing to a range of epistemologists, and this debate continues.Some discussion of the prospects for such arguments can be found inStern 1999 and Gomes 2017a.

Some issues that have been raised about The Bounds of Senseare the following. (1) Does Strawson himself provide a satisfactoryidentification of a good question that Kant’s Critique can beregarded as trying to answer? At about the same time that Strawsonpublished his book on Kant, Jonathan Bennett, in his bookKant’s Analytic suggested that Kant’s claims haveto be regarded as unobviously analytic if they are to be correct. IsStrawson’s conception better than this? (2) Is Strawson’sinterpretation of Kant – especially his account oftranscendental idealism – correct? (3) Does Strawson’s versionof Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories fare any betterthan Kant’s own? (4) Is Strawson right to think that there areinsights in Kant’s project which can be separated from histranscendental idealism? And (5) does Strawson defend theanti-sceptical transcendental arguments cogently? Strawson’srelation to Kant is discussed in Glock 2003, Gomes 2017b, and thepapers collected in a special issue of the European Journal ofPhilosophy (2016) marking the 50th anniversary of The Boundsof Sense.

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7. Later Books

Strawson published three more books (other than collections of essays)in English (plus another in French which overlaps with one of those inEnglish). In 1974 Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammarappeared. Strawson himself described this book as ‘probably themost ambitious and certainly the one that has received the leastattention’ (Strawson 2004, ix). He is right about the secondpoint but not, we suspect, about the first. It is an ambitious book,but can hardly be ranked above either Individuals or TheBounds of Sense in that respect! In the first part of it Strawsonpresents a revised version of his account of the normalsubject-predicate distinction, and also presents a partial theory ofone particular case of subject expressions, namely proper names. Inthis he was responding to the emergence of direct referential accountsof the kind that Kripke had made popular. The discussion of thesubject-predicate distinction is clearer and more direct than the oneachieved in Individuals. What Strawson particularly bringsout is that in ordinary language predicates have a complex role,involving the indication of universals, the expression ofexemplification, plus expression also of temporal aspects. Thisfunctional complexity explains the correctness of certain otheraccounts of the distinction. No consensus about the assessment ofStrawson’s proposal has emerged, the reason being that there hasstill been no very general interest in the subject-predicatedistinction. In the second part, Strawson develops an approach to theunderstanding of grammar in which he attempts to relate grammar, inthe sense of syntax, to much more basic functional specifications ofthe elements of a language, such that it becomes possible to seeactual grammars as different ways to achieve these functional roles.Again, no consensus has emerged about this highly original way tothink about grammar.

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In 1985 Strawson published Skepticism and Naturalism: SomeVarieties. The book grew out of Strawson’s WoodbridgeLectures at Columbia University in 1983. It is, in a sense, a book ofphilosophy about philosophy. In each chapter Strawson focuseson a philosophical dispute in which there is a strong tendency to denythe reality or existence of an aspect which common sense affirms. Theterm ‘skepticism’ in the title stands for this generalsceptical tendency. The first chapter concerns knowledge itself,denied by the philosophical sceptic. The later chapters consider thedenial of certain aspects of ordinary human thought and experience,such as the reality of colour by scientifically inspired philosophers,and the reality of thought and experience by a certain sort ofmaterialist. The thread linking these chapters is the scepticalthought that these aspects of our ordinary human experience are to befound wanting on account of their not being reducible to a morescientifically acceptable, physicalist base. In each case,Strawson’s aim is to deny the denial, and to explain, as onemight say, how philosophers can have their cake and eat it. Againstthe sceptic about knowledge, Strawson stresses that the claims thatthey deny are presuppositions of all human thought and enquiry;against the reductive naturalist he goes further, not only stressingthe inescapability of the ordinary human standpoint but also allowingit its own validity from its own particular standpoint.

The book is about philosophy in another sense, since it employs andilluminates some ideas from earlier philosophers, especially Hume andWittgenstein, and reveals Strawson’s very deep understanding ofthem. The book marks, also, a further development in Strawson’sengagement with epistemological scepticism. Strawson expressesagreement with some of his earlier critics (in particular Stroud) thattranscendental arguments are problematic as anti-sceptical devices,and suggests instead that scepticism can be set aside because no-oneis persuaded by sceptical arguments. Philosophical sceptical doubtsare not serious doubts, and so are not to be takenseriously. This further twist in Strawson’sepistemology has, again, inspired considerable debate, and noconsensus has yet emerged. In particular, it remains to be determinedhow strongly we should take Strawson’s suggestions that certainclaims are presuppositions on human thought and enquiry. One worry,which remains, is that Strawson’s point that no one is remotelyinclined to accept the sceptic’s claim that there is noknowledge establishes at most that we regard such arguments as havingthe status of defending a paradoxical conclusion, which in itself doesnot explain why the conclusion is incorrect. That remains to be done.However, as well as being an original contribution to epistemology thebook presents an approach to ontology which deserves to be calledOxonian, because it has been popular in Oxford. The idea is that thereis no good reason not to be realists about most aspects of the world,including colour, mentality, meaning, and perhaps value, but that thisdoes not require the defence of a reduction to some featuresof a supposedly more fundamental realm. This is a relaxedrealism that does not set its face against the claims of naturalscience, but rather refuses to take them as calling into question thelegitimacy of our ordinary ways of thinking about the world. This formof Oxford realism was influential on a generation of Britishphilosophers, many of whom were Strawson’s students.

Finally, in 1992, Strawson published Analysis and Metaphysics: anIntroduction to Philosophy. Strawson had given introductorylectures once he became a professor, and the lectures became thisbook. It is, again, a book about philosophy, contrasting differentconceptions of the subject, and defending Strawson’s ownconception of the nature and value of analysis. Of importance here isStrawson’s distinction between reductive and connective analysis.Strawson’s attitude is that the aim of analysis is to revealconceptual links and connexions, thereby illuminating some features ofour concepts, but that there is no favoured basic level of thought towhich it is the goal of philosophical analysis to reduce everythingelse. Echoing the name for his conception of ontology, one might callthat a conception of relaxed analysis. Strawson in factrepeatedly wrote about the nature of philosophy, and the views in thisbook are his final conclusions. It is also a book in which hepractises what he preaches in relation to certain chosen areas,including, for example, the topics of causation and explanation,experience, meaning, and freedom. Whether it is a good introductorybook or not, it is certainly a deep and interesting treatment of itstopics for the non-beginner! Strawson himself prepares the reader byremarking brilliantly that the book ‘though introductory… is not elementary. There is no such thing as elementaryphilosophy. There is no shallow end to the philosophical pool’(Strawson 1992, vii).

8. Some Themes in Strawson’s Writings

Strawson contributed ideas to debates about a wide range of topics,only some of which can be described here. We have selected five areasto describe.

8.1 Perception

Strawson made a major contribution to the theory of perception. Hisconception is articulated to some extent in The Bounds ofSense, but also in a series of articles, of which the most famousis ‘Perception and Its Objects’ (1979). He suggests thatthe concept of perception should be analysed as a causal concept. Hisversion of the causal theory differs from that of Grice, who alsofamously argued a similar analysis, in two main respects. First,Strawson argues for it in additional ways, notably by attempting toderive the conclusion from the idea that perception is essentially amethod of acquiring knowledge. Strawson suggests that this requiresthat the concept of perception is a causal concept. Second, Strawsonclaims that Grice’s attempt to spell out the right causal chainby picking it out via examples is circular, and he replaces it byinvoking notions of match and range. Strawson’s versionattracted considerable attention. But more important, he emphasisedthat there is no way to describe perceptual experience in terms whichare not physical-object concept involving. The attempt to do so hetakes to be the crucial mistake of the traditional empiricist model,as represented, for example, in the thought of A. J. Ayer. Accordingto Strawson we are not reading in or interpreting our experiences whenwe respond to them by making objective judgements. We are simplyendorsing their content. Strawson therefore holds that it is myth tosuppose that we can locate a level of claim on the basis of which wecan defend the validity of our application of physical objectconcepts. Rather, our experience is ‘saturated’ by thoseconcepts themselves. In a more recent terminology, Strawson holds thatperception involves the occurrence in us of experiences havingobjective representational content, and that there can behallucinations with a similar content but which are not properlyperceptual because the complex causal requirements for beingperceptual are not met. Strawson’s claims about perception arediscussed in Snowdon 1998.

8.2 Language

Strawson’s contribution to the philosophy of language is alsofar more extensive and important than so far indicated. He developedhis views in relation to the leading ideas of others about language.One conception that he opposed is that of Quine. Writing with Grice,he argued that Quine’s criticisms of the idea of analyticityrest on a commitment to a kind of reduction that itself is simply adogma. Moreover, repeatedly over the next twenty years he argued thatQuine’s sceptical approach to meaning, and related notions, isboth unfounded and also wrong in that it deprives us of notions thatwe cannot do without, in the study of logic and language. Strawsonalso engaged with Davidson’s account of meaning. His mainengagement came in his inaugural lecture ‘Meaning andTruth’ (1969), but also elsewhere. Strawson suggests that truthis itself a notion secondary to saying (and communication) and cannotplay the role in an account of meaning that Davidson proposed. Hisother reaction to the Davidsonian programme, which accepted a notionof logical form for natural language sentences specified in thecomplex formulae of predicate logic, was that there is no requirementto map ordinary language onto artificial logical structures, nor doesthat capture ordinary meaning anyway. This attitude ofStrawson’s placed him in opposition to a movement of thoughtthat swept through Oxford’s younger philosophers during the timehe was a professor. What Strawson never quite achieved was analternative explanation to Davidson’s of what a theory ofmeaning should be. His attitude to truth, and his slogan that ordinarylanguage has no precise logic, implied that centring an analysis ofmeaning on truth conditions and a search for logical forms in naturallanguage expressible in the predicate calculus was not correct. Giventhese constraints though he did not indicate how we do understandlinguistic utterances. Strawson also made important contributions, ona number of occasions, to the assessment of Austin’s theory ofspeech acts, and also in relation to Grice’s own model ofmeaning. Finally, he responded to the anti-realist approach developedby Dummett, which also gained its adherents, in ‘Scruton andWright on Anti-Realism’ (1976), a brief but brilliant critiquewhich argued that there are no obvious reasons to adopt theanti-realist account of truth, and moreover that it is hard to make itconsistent with what appear to be obvious facts about the knowability(or unknowability) of our psychological lives and also the past.

8.3 History of Philosophy

Another theme that needs stressing is Strawson’s engagement withthe history of philosophy. His work on Kant in The Bounds ofSense and in other articles is perhaps the most straightforwardexample of this engagement, but it is not the only instance. InIndividuals and elsewhere he wrote about Descartes,especially his account of selves. Leibniz is the hero, or perhapsanti-hero, of chapter 4 of Individuals. Hume and Wittgensteinare the central characters in Skepticism and Naturalism, andhe wrote about Spinoza, especially his theory of freedom. From thelast century, he wrote about Wittgenstein, in a famous review of thePhilosophical Investigations, published in Mind andreprinted in Strawson 2011, and also G.E. Moore. These writings revealboth a deep knowledge and a deep understanding of these thinkers,never unsympathetic and always able to see the wood as well as thetrees. Strawson had a sense of the age of philosophical problems andof the insights from the great dead philosophers that need preservingand renewing.

8.4 Scepticism and knowledge

We have set out, to some extent, the development of Strawson’sepistemological views, but have not described his earliest proposal inrelation to the problem of induction. In An Introduction toLogical Theory he pioneered what came to be called the‘analytical solution’, according to which there cannot beany question as to the rationality of the employment of induction,since by being rational we mean, amongst other things, usinginduction. The question whether induction is rational resembles,according to this approach, the question whether the law is legal.Since ‘being legal’ means ‘being in accordance withthe law’, there can be no question about the legality of thelaw. This remains a discussed approach. In Individuals hetalked of the satisfaction of certain conditions as being criterialfor the ascription of some disputed claims, and justified that bytranscendental arguments. The Bounds of Sense can be regardedas an extended anti-sceptical transcendental argument. Finally, inSkepticism and Naturalism he attempts to oppose the scepticby appealing to the inescapability of the claims opposed by thesceptic. The unity amongst all Strawson’s proposals is that theresponse to scepticism is never the production of a proof ordemonstration based on a level of thought external and prior to thediscourse in question. Each solution aims to turn aside scepticism insome other way. Strawson’s ingenuity in devising such responsesis very impressive and he is the source of at least three majorcurrently investigated anti-sceptical approaches.

8.5 Freedom and Resentment

Strawson always joked that he would turn to moral philosophy only whenhis powers were waning. He wrote very little on the topic, commentinglater on his ‘Freedom and Resentment’ and ‘SocialMorality and Individual Ideal’, that ‘[b]etween them,these two papers effectively embody all I have thought or have to sayin a philosophical area which, important as I recognize it to be, Ihave never found as intellectually gripping as those to which I havegiven more attention’ (Strawson 1998, 11). Nevertheless,‘Freedom and Resentment’ (Strawson 1962), is perhaps nowStrawson’s most famous and widely discussed paper.

Strawson’s purpose here is to dissolve the so-called problem ofdeterminism and responsibility. He does this by drawing a contrastbetween two different perspectives we can take on the world: the‘participant’ and ‘objective’ standpoints. Theseperspectives involve different explanations of other people’sactions. From the objective point of view, we see people as elementsof the natural world, causally manipulated and manipulable in variousways. From the participant point of view, we see others as appropriateobjects of ‘reactive attitudes’, attitudes such asgratitude, anger, sympathy and resentment, which presuppose theresponsibility of other people. These two perspectives are opposed toone another, but both are legitimate. In particular, Strawson arguesthat our reactive attitudes towards others and ourselves are naturaland irrevocable. They are a central part of what it is to behuman. The truth of determinism cannot, then, force us to give up theparticipant standpoint, because the reactive attitudes are too deeplyembedded in our humanity. Between determinism and responsibility therecan be no conflict.

One can see in this paper an application of some ideas of a Humeancharacter to a domain to which Hume himself was not inclined to applythem. There is also a suggestive affinity with Kant’s attempt todissolve the problem of free will in the Critique of PureReason. And the overall argument instantiates a general strategywhich Strawson applied in a number of areas and which he sets outexplicitly in Analysis and Metaphysics. Strawson’s paper isdiscussed in a set of papers published to mark its 50th anniversary(Shoemaker and Tognazzini 2015), and in (Watson 2004).

9. Conclusion

Strawson did not seek to make disciples, nor did he write too much byway of defence of his views against critics (except, as it were, whenhe had to). However, he produced a continuous flow of original andprofound, and elegantly expressed, philosophy dealing with a verybroad range of topics. He thereby exerted a considerable influence onphilosophy, both during his lifetime and, indeed, since his death.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

A. Books by Strawson

• 1952, Introduction to Logical Theory, London:Methuen.
• 1959, Individuals, London: Methuen.
• 1966, The Bounds of Sense, London: Methuen.
• 1971, Logico-Linguistic Papers, London: Methuen.
• 1974a, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London:Methuen.
• 1974b, Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar,London: Methuen, reprinted in 2004 by the Ashgate Press.
• 1985a , Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties,London: Methuen, and New York: Columbia University Press.
• 1985b, Analyse et Metaphysique, Paris: J. Vrin.
• 1992, Analysis and Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• 1997, Entity and Identity, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• 2011, Philosophical Writings, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

B. Selected Articles by Strawson

• 1950a, “On Referring”, Mind, 59:320–344; reprinted in Strawson 1971.
• 1950b, “Truth”, Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety, reprinted in Strawson 1971.
• 1956, (with P. Grice), “In Defense of a Dogma”,Philosophical Review Vol 50: 141 – 158.
• 1962, “Freedom and Resentment”, Proceedings of theBritish Academy, 48: 1–25; reprinted in Strawson1974a.
• 1964, “Identifying Reference and Truth-Values”,Theoria Vol 30(2): 96–118: page references to the reprint in Strawson1971.
• 1969, “Meaning and Truth”, reprinted in Strawson1971
• 1976, “Scruton and Wright on Anti-Realism”,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 77:15–21.
• 1979, “Perception and its Objects”, in Perceptionand Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, G. F. Macdonald(ed.) London: Macmillan.

Secondary Literature

• Austin, J. L., 1950, “Truth” reprinted inJ. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon Press1961.
• Ayer, A. J., 1963, “The Concept of a Person” inThe Concept of a Person and other essays, London:Macmillan.
• Bennett, J., 1966, Kant’s Analytic, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
• Brown, C., 2006, Peter Strawson, Stocksfield:Acumen,2006.
• Campbell, J., 1994, Past, Space and Self, London: MITPress.
• Cassam, Q., 1997, Self and World, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• –––, 2005, “Space and ObjectiveExperience” in Thought, Reference and Experience: Themesfrom the Philosophy of Gareth Evans, J. Bermúdez (ed.), Oxford:Oxford University Press.
• European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 24 (2016) –a set of papers marking the 50th anniversary of The Bounds ofSense.
• Evans, G., 1980, “Things without the Mind”, in VanStraaten 1980.
• –––, 1982, The Varieties of Reference,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Glock, H. (ed.), 2003, Strawson and Kant, Oxford:Clarendon Press
• Gomes, A., 2016, “Unity, Objectivity, and the Passivity ofExperience”, European Journal of Philosophy, 24:946–969.
• –––, 2017a, “Perception and Reflection”,Philosophical Perspectives, 31: 131–152.
• –––, 2017b, “Kant, the Philosophy of Mind, andTwentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy”, in A. Gomes & A.Stephenson (eds.), Kant and the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford:Oxford University Press.
• Hacker, P. M., 2002, “Strawson’s Concept of aPerson”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,102(1): 21–40.
• Hahn, L. E. (ed.), 1998, The Philosophy of P. F.Strawson, Chicago and Lasalle, Illinois: Open Court
• Harrison, R., 1970, “Strawson on outer objects”,Philosophical Quarterly, 20: 213–221.
• Huang, Y., 2007, Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress
• Martin, C. B., 1969, “People” in ContemporaryPhilosophy in Australia (eds.) Brown R. & Rollins C. D.,London: Allen and Unwin.
• Matthews, H., 1969, “Strawson on TranscendentalIdealism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 19:204–220.
• Philosophia, Volume 10 (1981) – a special issuededicated to the philosophy of P. F. Strawson.
• Putnam, H., 1998, “Strawson and Scepticism” in Hahn1998, pp. 273–287.
• Rorty, R., 1970, “Strawson’s ObjectivityArgument”, Review of Metaphysics, 24:207–244.
• Russell, B., 1905, “On Denoting”, reprinted inLogic and Knowledge, R. C. Marsh (ed.), London: Allen andUnwin.
• Searle, J., 1998, “Truth: A reconsideration ofStrawson’s Views” in Hahn 1998, pp. 385–401.
• Sen, P. K., & Verma R. R. (eds.), 1995, The Philosophy ofP. F. Strawson, New Dehli: Indian Council of PhilosophicalResearch.
• Shoemaker, D., & Tognazzini, N. (eds.), 2015, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 2: ‘Freedom and Resentment’ at 50, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Snowdon, P.F., 1998, “Strawson on the Concept ofPerception” in Hahn 1998, pp. 293–310.
• –––, 2006, “P.F. Strawson:Individuals”, in Central Works of Philosophy(Volume 5: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After), J. Shand (ed.),London: Routledge.
• –––, 2009, “‘Persons’ andPersons”, Organon F, 4: 449–476.
• Stern, R. (ed.), 1999, Transcendental Arguments: Problems andProspects, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Stroud, B., 1968, “Transcendental Arguments”,Journal of Philosophy, 65(9): 241–256; reprinted inStroud 2000.
• –––, 2000, “The Synthetic A Priori inStrawson’s Kantianism” in B. Stroud, UnderstandingHuman Knowledge: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress; reprinted in Glock 2003.
• –––, 2000 Understanding HumanKnowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Van Straaten, Z. (ed.), 1980, Philosophical Subjects; EssaysPresented to P. F. Strawson, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Warnock, G. J., 1964, “A Problem about Truth” in G.Pitcher (ed.), Truth, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
• Watson, G., 2004, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil:Variations on a Strawsonian Theme”, in G. Watson,Agency and Answerability, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wiggins, D., 1980, Sameness and Substance, London: BasilBlackwell.
• Williams, B., 1961, “Mr. Strawson on Individuals”,Philosophy, 36(138): 309–332; reprinted in B. Williams,Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1973.

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Synopsis

Excerpt

This book is based on lectures which were originally given in Oxford University in 1954–5 and were later used as material for a seminar in Duke University, N. Carolina in 1955–6. I am grateful for the help I received in discussion from my colleagues at Duke; and I wish also to acknowledge my great indebtedness to Miss Ruby Meager, Professor H.L.A. Hart and Professor Gilbert Ryle, all of whom read a part or the whole of the book in manuscript and gave me much helpful and friendly advice, which I have generally tried to follow.

Much of Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of an article which appeared in Vol. II of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven and Grover Maxwell and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1958. Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 are taken, with substantial modifications, from papers which appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1953–4 and 1957. I have to thank the editors and publishers of these volumes for permission to make use of this matter again.

P.F.S.

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Book details

259 pages

Publisher:Routledge

Place of publication: London

Publication year: 1990

• P. F.S.