Strawson Sir Peter (b.1919), British philosopher who has made major contributions to logic, metaphysics, and the study of Kant. His career has been at Oxford, where he was the leading philosopher of his generation. His first important work, ‘On Referring’ (1950), argues that Russell’s theory of descriptions fails to deal properly with the role of descriptions as ‘referring expressions’ because Russell assumed the ‘bogus trichotomy’ that sentences are true, false, or meaningless: for Strawson, sentences with empty descriptions are meaningful but ‘neither true nor false’ because the general presuppositions governing the use of referring expressions are not fulfilled. One aspect of this argument was Russell’s alleged insensitivity to the ordinary use of definite descriptions. The contrast between the abstract schemata of formal logic and the manifold richness of the inferences inherent in ordinary language is the central theme of Strawson’s first book, Introduction to Logical Theory (1952). In Individuals (1959) Strawson reintroduced metaphysics as a respectable philosophical discipline after decades of positivist rhetoric. But his project is only ‘descriptive’ metaphysics – elucidation of the basic features of our own conceptual scheme – and his arguments are based on the philosophy of language: ‘basic’ particulars are those which are basic objects of reference, and it is the spatiotemporal and sortal conditions for their identification and reidentification by speakers that constitute the basic categories. Three arguments are especially famous: (1) even in a purely auditory world objective reference on the basis of experience requires at least an analogue of space; (2) because self-reference presupposes reference to others, persons, conceived as bearers of both physical and psychological properties, are a type of basic particular; and (3) ‘feature-placing’ discourse, such as ‘it is snowing here now’, is ‘the ultimate propositional level’ through which reference to particulars enters discourse.
Strawson’s next book, The Bounds of Sense (1966), provides a critical reading of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. His aim is to extricate what he sees as the profound truths concerning the presuppositions of objective experience and judgment that Kant’s transcendental arguments establish from the mysterious metaphysics of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Strawson’s critics have argued, however, that the resulting position is unstable: transcendental arguments can tell us only what we must suppose to be the case. So if Kant’s idealism, which restricts such suppositions to things as they appear to us, is abandoned, we can draw conclusions concerning the way the world itself must be only if we add the verificationist thesis that ability to make sense of such suppositions requires ability to verify them. In his next book, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985), Strawson conceded this: transcendental arguments belong within descriptive metaphysics and should not be regarded as attempts to provide an external justification of our conceptual scheme. In truth no such external justification is either possible or needed: instead – and here Strawson invokes Hume rather than Kant – our reasonings come to an end in natural propensities for belief that are beyond question because they alone make it possible to raise questions. In a famous earlier paper Strawson had urged much the same point concerning the free will debate: defenders of our ordinary attitudes of reproach and gratitude should not seek to ground them in the ‘panicky metaphysics’ of a supra-causal free will; instead they can and need do no more than point to our unshakable commitment to these ‘reactive’ attitudes through which we manifest our attachment to that fundamental category of our conceptual scheme – persons.
See also FREE WILL PROBLEM , KANT, ORDI- NARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, PARADIGM CASE ARGUMENT, PRESUPPOSITION , RUSSELL , THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS , TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT. T.R.B.