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Articles


Peter Strawson (1919-2006): A Sort of Obituary


John Heawood gives us an overview of Peter Strawson’s subtle philosophy, and explains why his insights about predicates and persons still matter.



Sir Peter Strawson, who died this year aged 86, was a major figure in a great era of English-language
philosophy, and a pioneer of what is generally called conceptual analysis. Strawson’s own name
for his philosophical method was ‘descriptive metaphysics’ – defined as an attempt
to describe “the actual structure of our thought about the world” – as opposed to the
revisionary metaphysics of, say, Descartes or Leibniz, which was “concerned to produce a better
structure” (Individuals p.9).


His most fundamental work in this vein is found in two books: Individuals and The Bounds
of Sense (which he dubbed “a scaled-down Kantianism”). But Strawson wrote other books,
and many papers: on logic and epistemology, on philosophy of language, ethics and aesthetics.


…