P. F. Strawson


Sir Peter Frederick Strawson was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at the University of Oxford. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1968 to 1987. He had previously held the positions of college lecturer and tutorial fellow at University College, Oxford, a college he returned to upon his retirement in 1987, and which provided him with rooms until his death.
Paul Snowdon and Anil Gomes, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, comment that Strawson "exerted a considerable influence on philosophy, both during his lifetime and, indeed, since his death."

Life

Strawson was born in Ealing, west London, and brought up in Finchley, north London, by his parents, both of whom were teachers. He was educated at Christ's College, Finchley, followed by St John's College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
During the Second World War, Strawson served first with the Royal Artillery from 1940, and then with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He was demobilised in 1946, with the rank of captain.
After his military service, he went initially to the University College of North Wales at Bangor, as an assistant lecturer. After winning the John Locke scholarship in 1946, and the support of Gilbert Ryle, he went to University College, Oxford, initially as a lecturer, and then, from 1948, as a fellow. Strawson was a pupil of Paul Grice, who later became his colleague and collaborator. In 1968 he succeeded Gilbert Ryle as the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford.
Strawson was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960 and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1969 to 1970. He was knighted in 1977, for services to philosophy.

Philosophical work

Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring", a criticism of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions that Russell explained in the famous "On Denoting" article.
In philosophical methodology, there are two important and interrelated features of Strawson's work that are worthy of note. The first is the project of a 'descriptive' metaphysics, and the second is his notion of a shared conceptual scheme, composed of concepts operated in everyday life. In his book Individuals, Strawson attempts to describe various concepts that form an interconnected web, representing our common, shared, human conceptual scheme. In particular, he examines our conceptions of basic particulars, and how they are variously brought under general spatio-temporal concepts. What makes this a metaphysical project is that it exhibits, in fine detail, the structural features of our thought about the world, and thus precisely delimits how we, humans, think about reality.
Strawson's Individuals played a role in reviving the field of metaphysics following its unpopularity during the period following the linguistic turn, although the metaphysics which followed Strawson was different, Strawson was only concerned in describing the logical structure of our thinking about the world.
Strawson was a collaborator of his former tutor Paul Grice, together they published a famous paper titled "In Defence of a Dogma" in reply to W. V. O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Grice was reluctant to commit his ideas to print, and according to Strawson "it was only after persistent bullying on my part that he brought himself, some years after its composition, to publish his own highly original, ingenious, and justly celebrated first article on Meaning ".
Strawson distinguished between 'revisionary' and 'descriptive metaphysics', he wrote: "Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure". The purpose of the former is to "lay bare the most general features of our conceptual scheme" and to understand structures which do not "readily display itself on the structures of language but lies submerged" by analysing those metaphysical concepts which have always existed. He lists Aristotle and Kant as descriptive and Descartes and Leibniz as revisionary.

Personal life

After serving as a captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during World War II, Strawson married Ann Martin in 1945. They had four children, including the philosopher Galen Strawson.
P. F. Strawson lived in Oxford all his adult life and died in hospital on 13 February 2006 after a short illness. He was the elder brother of Major General John Strawson.
His obituary in The Guardian noted that "Oxford was the world capital of philosophy between 1950 and 1970, and American academics flocked there, rather than the traffic going the other way. That golden age had no greater philosopher than Sir Peter Strawson."
In its obituary, The Times of London described him as a "philosopher of matchless range who made incisive, influential contributions to problems of language and metaphysics". The author went on to say:
His portrait was painted by the artists Muli Tang and Daphne Todd.

Works

Books

  • Introduction to Logical Theory,
  • * Japanese translation by S. Tsunetoshi, et al.
  • Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics,
  • * German translation by F. Scholz
  • * French translation by A. Shalom and P. Drong
  • * Italian translation by E. Bencivenga
  • * Japanese translation by H. Nakamura
  • * Polish translation by B. Chwedenczuk
  • * Spanish translation by A. Suarez and L. Villanueva
  • *Brazilian Portuguese translation by P. J. Smith
  • The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
  • * Spanish translation by C. Luis Andre
  • * German translation by E. Lange
  • * Italian translation by M. Palumbo
  • * Japanese translation by T. Kumagai, et al.
  • Logico-Linguistic Papers.
  • Freedom and Resentment and other Essays.
  • Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar.
  • Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties.
  • Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy.
  • * Estonian translation by T. Hallap
  • Entity and Identity.
  • Philosophical Writings, ed. Galen Strawson and Michelle Montague,

    Articles

  • "Necessary Propositions and Entailment Statements"
  • "Truth" reprinted in MacDonald, Margaret Philosophy and Analysis
  • "Ethical Intuitionism", reprinted in Philosophical Writings and Sellars and Hospers, Readings in Ethical Theory
  • "Truth", reprinted in Longworth, Guy
  • "On Referring", reprinted in Copi, Irving Contemporary Readings in Logical Theory
  • "Particular and General"
  • "A Logician's Landscape"
  • "Construction and Analysis" in A.J. Ayer et al., The Revolution in Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1956
  • "Singular Terms, Ontology and Identity"
  • "" with H. P. Grice, reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "Logical Subjects and Physical Objects"
  • "Propositions, Concepts and Logical Truths"
  • "Proper Names", reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "On Justifying Induction"
  • "The Post-Linguistic Thaw", reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "
  • "Singular Terms and Predication", reprinted in Philosophical Logic
  • "Perception and Identification"
  • "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems v. Natural Languages in Analytical Philosophy" in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P.A. Schilpp
  • " A Problem about Truth: A reply to Mr. Warnock" in Truth, ed. G. Pitcher, Englewood Cliffs
  • "Truth: A Reconsideration of Austin's Views"
  • "Self, Mind and Body"
  • "Is Existence Never A Predicate"
  • "Bennett on Kant's Analytic", reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "Meaning and Truth"
  • "" in The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. by Richard Rorty.
  • "Imagination and Perception" in Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J.W. Swanson
  • "Categories" in Ryle: A Collection of Critical essays, ed. O.P. Wood and G. Pitcher,
  • "The Asymmetry of Subjects and Predicates" in Language, Belief and Metaphysics, ed. H.E. Kiefer and M.K. Munitz
  • "Self-Reference, Contradiction and Content-Parasitic Predicates"
  • ""
  • "Austin and 'Locutionary Meaning'" in Essays on J.L. Austin, ed. I Berlin
  • "On Understanding the Structure of One's Language" in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays
  • "Positions for Quantifiers" in Semantics and Philosophy, ed. M.K. Munitz and P.K. Unger
  • "Does Knowledge Have Foundations?", reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "Semantics, Logic and Ontology"
  • "Knowledge and Truth", reprinted in Philosophical Writings
  • "Entity and Identity" in Contemporary British Philosophy Fourth Series, ed. H.D. Lewis
  • "Scruton and Wright on Anti-Realism"
  • "May Bes and Might Have Beens" in Meaning and Use, ed. A. Margalit
  • "Perception and its Objects" in Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A.J. Ayer, ed. G.F. Macdonald
  • "Universals"
  • "Belief, Reference and Quantification"
  • "P.F. Strawson Replies" in Philosophical Subjects Presented to P.F. Strawson, ed. Zak Van Straaten
  • "Comments and Reples"
  • "Logical Form and Logical Constants" in Logical Form, Predication and Ontology, ed. P.K. Sen
  • "Liberty and Necessity" in Spinoza, His Thought & Work, ed. Nathan Rotenstreich and Norma Schneider, reprinted in Analysis and Metaphysics
  • "Causation and Explanation" in Essays on Davidson, ed. Bruce Vermazen and J. Hintikka, reprinted in Analysis and Metaphysics
  • "Direct Singular Reference: Intended Reference and Actual Reference" in Wo steht die Analytische Philosophie Heute?, 1986
  • "Reference and its Roots" in The Philosophy of W.V. Quine. ed L.E. Hahn and P.A. Schilpp
  • "Kant's Paralogisms: Self Consciousness and the 'Outside Observer'" in Theorie der Subjektivität, ed. K. Cramer, F. Fulda, R.-P. Hortsmann, U. Poshast
  • "Concepts and Properties, or Predication and Copulation"
  • "Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics" in Metaphysik nach Kant, ed. Dieter Henrich and R.-P. Horstmann
  • "Ma Philosophie: son développement, son thème central et sa nature générale"
  • "Sensibility, Understanding and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on D. Henrich and P. Guyer" in Kant's Transcendental Deductions, ed. E. Forster
  • "Two Conceptions of Philosophy" in Perspectives on Quine, ed. Robert Barrett and Roger Gibson
  • "The Incoherence of Empiricism"
  • "Comments on Some Aspects of Peter Unger's Identity, Consciousness and Value
  • "Echoes of Kant"
  • "Replies" in Ensayos sobre Strawson, ed. Carlos E. Carosi
  • "Knowing From Words" in Knowing From Words, ed. B. K. Matilal and A. Chakrabati
  • "My Philosophy" and "Replies" to critics in The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson, ed. P.K. Sen and R.K. Verma
  • "Individuals" in Philosophical Problems Today, Vol. 1, ed. G. Floistad
  • "The Problem of Realism and the A Priori" in Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, ed. Paolo Parrini
  • "Introduction", "Kant on Substance" and "Meaning and Context" in ''Entity and Identity''