Background
STRAWSON, Peter was born on November 23, 1919 in London. Son of Cyril Walter Strawson and Nellie Dora Strawson.
professor of metaphysical philosophy
STRAWSON, Peter was born on November 23, 1919 in London. Son of Cyril Walter Strawson and Nellie Dora Strawson.
Christ's College, Finchley, St. John's College, Oxford.
1946, Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University College of North Wales. John Locke Scholar, University of Oxford. 1947-1968, Lecturer in Philosophy (1947), Praelector (1948), Fellow (1948-1968).
Honorary Fellow (1979) of University College, Oxford. 1960, Fellow of the British Academy. 1966-1987. Reader (1966-1968), then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy (1968-1987), University of Oxford.
1968-1987, Fellow, then Honorary Fellow (1989), Magdalen College, Oxford. 1971, Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1977, Knighted; 1990, Member, Academia Europaea.
Several visiting appointments in the USA and Europe.
Introduction to Logical Theory 1952, Individuals 1959, The Bounds of Sense 1966, Logico-Linguistic Papers 1971, Freedom and Resentment 1974, Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar 1974, Naturalism and Skepticism 1985, Analyse et Metaphysique 1985.
new edition, London: Routledge, 1990.(1966) The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason
The influence of analytical and ordinary language philosophy account for Strawson’s interest in language, thought and their ‘objects’. This interest appears already in ‘Truth’, which attacks the semantic theory of truth: ‘true’ does not describe semantic or other properties. Rather, ‘true’ and ‘false’ are performative or expressive—to say a sentence is ‘true’ is to express agreement with it.
This article prompted his controversy with J. L. Austin, a defender of the correspondence theory of truth: explaining truth as correspondence between statements and facts fails, argues Strawson, since facts are not something statements name or refer to—‘facts are what statements state’.
Strawson’s 1950 article ‘On referring’ attacks Russell's ‘theory of definite descriptions’. For Russell, a sentence such as ‘The King of France is wise’ is false, since, when analysed, it contains an assertion ot existence. Russell’s analysis, Strawson argues, compounds the notions of referring to something and asserting its existence—‘to refer is not to assert’—though in referring to something one may ‘imply’ that it exists.
Strawson argues that Russell fails to distinguish sentences, their use and their utterance. Whereas for Russell a sentence is true, false or meaningless, Strawson maintains that a sentence is significant in virtue of conventions governing its use, irrespective of whether the sentence, when uttered, is about something. A sentence such as that concerning the King of France is meaningful but, if not used to refer to something, the question of its truth or falsity does not arise.
Interest in the relation between formal logic and ordinary language continues in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), which partly aims ‘to bring out some points of contrast and of contact between the behaviour of words in ordinary speech and the behaviour of symbols in a logical system’.
Formal logicians cannot, Strawson argues, give the exact, systematic logic of expressions of everyday speech, ‘for these expressions have no exact and systematic logic. Formal logic is an ‘idealized abstraction revealing certain structural traits of ordinary language but omitting others. The notion of a gap between formal logic and ordinary language has drawn criticism, but it motivates Strawson's criticisms of the formal semantics popularized by Donald Davidson.
Strawson’s concerns also appear in Individuals (1959). the subtitle of which, however, marks a new interest in ‘descriptive metaphysics’.
This enterprise differs from ‘revisionary metaphysics’, in that while ‘descriptive metaphy
sics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’, and from conceptual analysis in its scope and generality, since its aims ‘to lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’. The book's first part maintains that material bodies are the basic particulars to which we refer and of which we predicate qualities, kinds, etc. Chapter 3, ‘Persons’, argues for the primitiveness of the concept of a person, ‘a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics.. are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type’.
Making states of consciousness secondary in relation to the concept of a person enables Strawson to avoid traditional difficulties concerning the mind body problem. The book's second part examines the distinction between logico-grammatical subjects and their predicates. Reflection on two traditional criteria for this distinction allows Strawson to view particulars as paradigm logical subjects and thus to explain ‘the traditional, persistent link in our philosophy between the particular universal distinction and the subject predicate distinction’.
In arguing that a subject expression presupposes some empirical fact identifying a particular, Strawson comes to regard particulars as ‘complete’ and universal as ‘incomplete’, thus giving added depth to Frege's notion of ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’ sentence constituents.
The conclusions reached in Individuals form the basis for later works, notably The Bounds of Sense (1966) and Subject and Predicate (1974), but also underpin Strawson’s examination of scepticism and naturalism in 1985, where he rejects philosophical scepticism and reductive naturalism by appeal to certain traits in ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. Certain essays in Freedom and Resentment, however, show Strawson's work in other areas of philosophy. And in his most recent publication, based on introductory courses taught at Oxford, he examines the nature of philosophical practice.
In this work, he distances himself from ordinary language philosophy and reductive analytical philosophy, regarding philosophy as the attempt to understand the relations between concepts, an attempt that, while broadly ‘analytical’, does not aim to reduce such concepts to others more simple.
Academy Europaea 1990. American Academy, of Arts and Sciences 1971.
Married Grace Hall Martin 1945.