School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemStrawson's Individuals( 1974)Individuals, by P.F. Strawson, was first published in 1959. It attracted considerable attention then and has remained a most important philosophical text: both because it brought the subject of metaphysics back with a flourish from the exile imposed by the Logical Positivists, among others, and because of its original contribution to our understanding of our conceptual scheme. In Part I of individuals a large number of important philosophical issues are dealt with by careful and closely textured argument: these include the nature of descriptive metaphysics, the Mind-Body problem, reference and referring descriptions, the nature of space and time, a modified Leibnizian thesis, and the ascription of M- and P- predicates and its rationale. However this very wideness has worked against the book's being evaluated as a whole: instead there has been an unfortunate tendency for philosophers to rummage through it for sections which deal with their own, often narrow, interests. This is doubly undesirable: it is discourteous to the author and has also meant that some of his more important preoccupations and theses have been neglected in the scramble. This present thesis is, then, an attempt to play fairly by Strawson. It is, hopefully, more directly concerned with what is actually said than are many of Strawson's critics, However, the discussion has been limited to an examination of Part I: both because Part I is of more general philosophical interest and because the thesis is already over one hundred and fifty pages in length. Even then it has not been possible to deal fully with all the questions Strawson has raised. In order to preserve the homogeneity of the thesis all references to the arguments of other commentators occur in notes at the end. This should enable Strawson's own enterprise to be seen for what it is - a major contribution to post-war philosophy.