Strawson proposed in the early seventies an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of `what is said' when a sentence is uttered. The proposed scheme is somewhat crude and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various points to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review the scheme of Strawson, note his concerns, and add some of our own. However, our main point is to defend the essence of Strawson's approach and to recommend (...) it as a starting point for research into intended meaning and context. (shrink)

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at (...) least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication analysis by providing a simpler account of the processes that we go through when interpreting conditionals.

P. F. Strawson's influential article "Freedom and Resentment" has been much commented on, and one of the most trenchant commentaries is Rajendra Prasad's, "Reactive Attitudes, Rationality, and Determinism." In his article, Prasad contests the significance of the reactive attitude over a precise theory of determinism, concluding that Strawson's argument is ultimately unconvincing. In this article, I evaluate Prasad's challenges to Strawson by summarizing and categorizing all of the relevant arguments in both Strawson's and Prasad's pieces. -/- Strawson offers four types (...) of arguments to demonstrate that determinism and free agency cannot be incompatible, showing that the reactive attitude is natural and desirable and the objective attitude is not natural, not desirable, not sustainable, and not compatible with the reactive attitude. Prasad targets Strawson's incompatibilist arguments, showing that determinism and free agency are incompatible. Of Prasad's seven types of arguments, four target Strawson's four above. Three of these succeed and one fails. The remaining three target Strawson's support of the reactive attitude, and of these, one succeeds, and the others fail. Although Prasad's arguments miss the mark at times, he does succeed in putting forth a legitimate challenge to Strawson's notion that determinism is no inhibitor of the reactive attitude. (shrink)

Strawson's philosophical attitude towards scepticism is frequently thought to have undergone a significant shift from the “strong” or “robust” employment of transcendental arguments in Individuals to a more “modest” understanding of the efficacy of such arguments in Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. I argue that this interpretation is based upon a misunderstanding of the function of transcendental arguments in Strawson's earlier works. Examining the continuity of Strawson's modest naturalistic approach to scepticism can offer some insight as to the continuing overestimation (...) of the anti-sceptical efficacy of transcendental arguments. (shrink)

In that book I had two different, though not unrelated aims. The first chapter was concerned with traditional scepticisms about, e.g., the external world and induction. In common with Hume and Wittgenstein (and even Heidegger) I argued that the attempt to combat such doubts by rational argument was misguided: for we are dealing here with the presuppositions, the framework, of all human thought and enquiry. In the other chapters my target was different. It was that species of naturalism which tended (...) to discredit, or somehow to reduce to more scientifically acceptable, physicalistic terms, whole regions of ordinary human thought, language, and experience – in particular the regions of moral discourse, of the subjectively mental and of the intensional. Here my reaction, as well as my target, was different. I did not merely stress the inescapability of the natural or common human standpoint from which we normally take for granted all that is called in question by scientistic naturalism. I also allowed the latter its own validity from its own limited standpoint.2 Philosophical scepticism and scientistic naturalism represent two types of challenge to ‘central features of our ordinary thought and talk’.3 The overall aim of Scepticism and Naturalism is to respond to these challenges and thereby to vindicate what Strawson refers to elsewhere as ‘our natural metaphysics’. (shrink)

A review of Hans-Johann Glock's edited volume. -/- .

This paper observes that P. F. Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics is a baffling one from the perspective of traditional metaphysics. If one thinks of metaphysics as the study of the fundamental nature of reality, it is bewildering to divide up metaphysics in this way. The paper then tries to show how the distinction is no longer bewildering if we deny that such study is possible.

In the Transcendental Deductions, Kant attempts to establish the necessary applicability of the categories to what is encountered in experience. As I see it, the argument is intended to deduce two distinct, but, in Kant’s eyes, interrelated, claims. The first is that it is a necessity that experience be of an objective world. Call this rough idea the objectivity thesis. The second thesis is that the categoriesapply only to mere appearances, that is, the world insofar as we structure it. Call (...) this the idealist thesis. P. F. Strawson attempted to split the two claims in order to save the objectivity thesis from what he saw as its unnecessary idealist trappings. My thesis is that the objectivity thesis depends upon the idealist thesis and cannot survive on its own. (shrink)

Strawson offers three accounts of singular predication: a grammatical, a category and a mediating account. I argue that the grammatical and mediating accounts are refuted by a host of counter-examples and that the latter is worse than useless. In later works Strawson defends only the category account. This account entails that singular terms cannot be predicates; it excludes non-denoting singular terms from being logical subjects, except by means of an ad hoc analogy; it depends upon a notion of identification that (...) is too vague; and it is unnecessarily complicated, relying on analogies where a more uniform explanation should be possible. But I show how the account can be corrected to avoid all these difficulties and to provide an accurate account of singular predication. (shrink)

Kant is generally regarded as the greatest modern philosopher. But that analytic philosophers treat him as a central voice in contemporary debates is largely due to Sir Peter Strawson, the most eminent philosopher living in Britain today. In this collection, leading Kant scholars and analytic philosophers, including Strawson himself, for the first time assess his relation to Kant. The essays raise questions about how philosophy should deal with its past, what kind of insights it can achieve, and whether we can (...) have knowledge of an objective reality. (shrink)

Strawson's concept of a person is examined and evaluated.

In his Introduction to Logical Theory, Strawson argues that Aristotelian logic can be given a successful interpretation into ordinary English, but not into the symbolism of Principia Mathematica, on the grounds that Aristotelian logic and ordinary English share something absent in PM, namely, the doctrine of presupposition. It is argued that Strawson is mistaken. PM does justice to the logical rules of Aristotelian logic and also has a fully articulated doctrine of presupposition.

It is argued that Strawson's celebrated attacks on Russell's views about proper names and descriptions are misleading and unfounded. An attempt is made to show that Strawson's alternative views are philosophically more problematic than Russell's. It is also argued that, properly stated, Russell's analyses do not do violence to ordinary usage and that attempts to justify Strawson's analysis on the ground that it fits better with ordinary usage are mistaken.

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

Realism and conventionalism generally establish the parameters of debate over universals. Do abstract terms in language refer to abstract things in the world? The realist answers yes, leaving us with an inflated ontology; the conventionalist answers no, leaving us with subjective categories. I want to defend nominalism in its original medieval sense, as one possibility that aims to preserve objectivity while positing nothing more than concrete individuals in the world. First, I will present paradigmatic statements of realism and conventionalism as (...) developed by Russell and Strawson. Then, I will present the nominalist alternative as developed by William of Ockham. (shrink)

The classical argument for the existence of other minds begins by ascribing states of consciousness to oneself, and argues to the existence of other conscious beings on the basis of an analogy in bodily constitution and behavior. P. F. Strawson attacks the foundation of this argument. “One can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. One can ascribe them to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience.” My thesis is that (...) this objection depends on running together the two distinct necessary conditions for ascribing states of consciousness. There is the conceptual condition (a general concept of consciousness); and there is the referential condition (the capacity to identify suitable subjects).A version of the argument from analogy is also developed which does not presuppose an original consciousness that my experiences are mine. The general concept of experience is by itself enough for the original specification of all experiences associated with body M, because other experiences which also conform to the concept are not introduced until the argument from analogy is complete. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze the Strawson's notion of presupposition proposed in his book Introduction to Logical Theory. Strawsonian notion of presupposition is dependent on the notion of logical entailment. We make use of the theory of logical consequence operation as a general framework to show that it is impossible to find a logical consequence operation which mirrors the philosophical intuitions of the Strawson's notions of presupposition. The aim of this paper is to present in details the philosophical backgrounds of (...) the formal analysis presented in the author's paper "Strawsonian presuppositions and logical entailment". (shrink)

I aim to answer the questions of whether reactive practices such as gratitude and punishment are inherently expressive, and, if so, in what respect. I distinguish seven ways in which one might plausibly characterize reactive practices as essentially expressive in nature, and organise them so that they progress in a dialectical order, from weakest to strongest. I then critically discuss objections that apply to the strongest conception, questioning whether it coheres with standard retributive understandings of why, when and where the (...) reactive practice of punishment is justified. (shrink)

Over a period of more than twenty years, Sybil Wolfram gave lectures at Oxford University on Philosophical Logic, a major component of most of the undergraduate degree programmes. She herself had been introduced to the subject by Peter Strawson, and saw herself as working very much within the Strawsonian tradition. Central to this tradition, which began with Strawson's seminal attack on Russell's theory of descriptions in ‘On Referring' (1950), is the distinction between a sentence and what is said by a (...) sentence − Strawson initially called the latter a use of a sentence, and sometimes a proposition , but his most frequent term for what is said , which Wolfram consistently adopts, is the statement expressed.1 The force of the distinction is clearly illustrated in ‘On Referring', which uses it to undermine the common assumption that any sentence must be either true, or false, or meaningless. Russell had argued on this basis that a sentence such as ‘The King of France is bald' (which is clearly neither true nor meaningless) must be false, but Strawson points out that if we distinguish between the sentence itself and the statement that it expresses (on some occasion of use), we can quite easily combine the admission that the sentence is meaningful − for it can in appropriate circumstances be used to express true and false statements − with the claim that nevertheless if the circumstances are ‘inappropriate' (in particular, when there is no current King of France), the sentence can fail to express a statement that is either true or false. On this picture, therefore, it is sentences that are meaningful, but statements that are the primary bearers of truth. (shrink)

Introductory essay: the privacy of physiological phenomena, by H. Morick.--Meditations I, II, and VI, by R. Descartes.--Descartes' myth, by G. Ryle.--I think, therefore I am, by A. J. Ayer.--Of personal identity, by D. Hume.--Hume on personal identity, by T. Penelhum.--Paralogisms of pure reason, by I. Kant.--Self, mind, and body, by P. F. Strawson.--Soul, by P. F. Strawson.--The distinction between mental and physical phenomena, by F. Brentano.--Brentano on descriptive psychology and the intentional, by R. Chisholm.--Note on the text, by R. Rhees.--Notes (...) for lectures on "Private experience" and "Sense data," by L. Wittgenstein.--Consciousness and self, by J.-P. Sartre.--Self knowledge, by G. Ryle.--Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations, by N. Malcolm.--Is consciousness a brain process? By U. T. Place.--Persons, by P. F. Strawson.--Further readings (p. 309-311). (shrink)

Strawson has recently developed a style of semantic subject-predicate analysis which, applied to certain sentences, rivals a standard account that turns on the notion of scope. His account depends on three notions: (i) complex, derivative properties, (ii) predicate-negation, and (iii) substantiation—an alleged semantic function having particular-specification as a special case. As I further develop it, the suspicion energes that his account simply is the scope account in disguise. I show that it is rather an untenable rival, placing the blame on (...) his notion (iii), vindicating his notion (i) and finding his notion (ii) theoretically needless. (shrink)

A Russellian theory of (definite) descriptions takes an utterance of the form ‘The F is G’ to express a purely general proposition that affirms the existence of a (contextually) unique F: there is exactly one F [which is C] and it is G. Strawson, by contrast, takes the utterer to presuppose in some sense that there is exactly one salient F, but this is not part of what is asserted; rather, when the presupposition is not met, the utterance simply fails (...) to express a (true or false) proposition. A defender of Strawson’s approach, however, must square up to what appear to be straightforward counterexamples to the presupposition thesis, and must also provide an account of certain linguistic phenomena that supposedly demand treating descriptions as quantifiers, as the Russellian theory does. In this paper I propose fresh considerations in favour of Strawson’s approach. I shift attention from what the utterer presupposes to preconditions for the use of descriptions, and distinguish between referring and predicative uses of descriptions (not to be confused with referential and attributive uses); importantly, the referring and predicative uses have different preconditions, I argue, and these provide some satisfactory responses to the aforementioned challenges facing the Strawsonian. (shrink)

(1) The table is covered with books. (2) There is exactly one table and it is covered with books.