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)
P.F. Strawson’s work on moral responsibility is well-known. However, an important implication of the landmark “Freedom and Resentment” has gone unnoticed. Specifically, a natural development of Strawson’s position is that we should understand being morally responsible as having externalistically construed pragmatic criteria, not individualistically construed psychological ones. This runs counter to the contemporary ways of studying moral responsibility. I show the deficiencies of such contemporary work in relation to Strawson by critically examining the positions of John Martin Fischer and Mark (...) Ravizza, R. Jay Wallace, and Philip Pettit for problems due to individualistic assumptions. (shrink)
This paper compares the treatment of other minds in Strawson and Sartre. Both discussions are presented here as transcendental arguments, and some striking parallels between them are brought out. However the primary significance of the alignment lies in the difference that emerges between two forms of transcendental proof, with the phenomenological treatment in Sartre promising to yield a stronger conclusion than Strawson's argument. The paper goes some way towards bringing out this difference.
Two notable thought experiments are discussed in this article: Reid's thought experiment about whether a being supplied with tactile sensations alone could acquire the conception of extension and Strawson's thought experiment about whether a being supplied with auditory sensations alone could acquire the conception of mind-independent objects. The experiments are considered alongside Campbell's argument that only on the so-called relational view of experience is it possible for experiences to make available to their subjects the concept of mind-independent objects. I consider (...) how the three issues ought to be construed as raising questions about woulds, coulds, or shoulds. (shrink)
This paper starts from the debate between proponents of a neo-Lockean psychological continuity view of personal identity, and defenders of the idea that we are simple mental substances. Each party has valid criticisms of the other; the impasse in the debate is traced to the Lockean assumption that substance is only externally related to its attributes. This suggests the possibility that we could develop a better account of mental substance if we thought of it as having an internal relation to (...) its states. I suggest that we may be able to do this by relying on the notion of expression. In developing this idea I draw heavily on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology, while also developing and criticizing Strawson's account of persons and recent work by Lynne Baker. I conclude by arguing that mental substance, understood in this way, can only be grasped in narrative terms; substantialist and narrative accounts of personal identity, far from being opposed, are mutually supporting and require one another to be coherent. (shrink)
A type theory constructed with reference to a particular language will associate with each monadic predicate P of that language a class of individuals C(P) of which it is categorically significant to predicate P (or which P spans, for short). The extension of P is a subset of C(P), which is a subset of the language’s universe of discourse. The set C(P) is a category discriminated by the language. The relation 'is spanned by the same predicates as' divides the language’s (...) universe of discourse into equivalence classes. These are the types discriminated by the language. This paper criticizes an attempt by Peter Strawson to explain terms peculiar to type theory in terms of other notions not peculiar to type theory. (shrink)
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)
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)
Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson (...) did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5). Conclusion: We can have well-defined notions of synonymy and analyticity even if we embrace Quine's holism, naturalism, behaviorism, and radical translation. Quine's meaning skepticism is to be repudiated on Quinean grounds. (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.
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)
This critical editorial introduction summarizes and explicates Frederick Will’s pragmatic realism and his account of the nature, assessment, and revision of cognitive and practical norms in connection with: the development of Will’s pragmatic realism, Hume’s problem of induction, the oscillations between foundationalism and coherentism, the nature of philosophical reflection, Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, the open texture of empirical concepts, the correspondence conception of truth, Putnam’s ‘internal realism’, the redundancy theory of truth, sociology of knowledge, the governance of practice by (...) norms and the assessment and revision of norms in practice, scientific realism, the alleged independence of reason and tradition, rule-following, legal realism, ethical intuitionism and moral relativism, the regress problem (both in epistemology and in moral theory), the paradox of analysis, and culminating in Will’s account of the philosophical governance of norms. These issues are discussed in close consideration of the views of: William Alston, John Dewey, Descartes, Leibniz, Waismann, Austin, Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Richard Rorty, Michael Williams, Hempel, Carnap, Simon Blackburn, Ramsey, Strawson, Kuhn, Wilfrid Sellars, Wittgenstein, Nozick, Dretske, Quine, Barbara Herman, Hardy Jones, Marcus Singer, and Gerd Buchdahl. (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)
Sir Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called (...) ‘Illusionism’, is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson’s position. (shrink)
Conceptual analysis, like any exclusively theoretical activity, is far from overrated in current psychology. Such a situation can be related both to the contingent influences of contextual and historical character and to the more essential metatheoretical reasons. After a short discussion of the latter it is argued that even within a strictly empirical psychology there are non-trivial tasks that can be attached to well-defined and methodologically reliable, conceptual work. This kind of method, inspired by the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, (...) class='Hi'>Peter Strawson (conceptual grammar), and Gilbert Ryle (conceptual geography), is proposed and formally depicted as being holistic, descriptive, and connective. Finally, the newly presented framework of connective conceptual analysis is defended against the “Charge from Psychology,” in a version developed by William Ramsey, claiming that conceptual analysis is based on psychological assumptions that have already been refuted by empirical psychology. (shrink)
Peter Strawson defends the thesis that determinism is irrelevant to the justifiability of responsibility-attributions. In this paper, I want to examine various arguments advanced by Strawson in support of this thesis. These arguments all draw on the thought that the practice of responsibility is inescapable. My main focus is not so much the metaphysical details of Strawsonian compatibilism, but rather the more fundamental idea that x being inescapable may be reason for us to regard x as justified. I divide (...) Strawsonian inescapability arguments into two basic types. According to arguments of the first type we cannot give up the practice. According to arguments of the second type we should not give up the practice. My reasons for revisiting these Strawsonian inescapability arguments are, first, to establish that these are different and to some extent conflicting arguments. Second, I hope to show that none of Strawson’s inescapability arguments are convincing. Third, I discuss the possibility that the practice of responsibility is inescapable in a different, more pessimistic sense than envisaged by Strawson. What may be inescapable under conceivable scenarios is the conflict of theoretical and practical considerations in the justification of the practice. (shrink)
In recent defenses of moral responsibility skepticism, which is the view that no human agents are morally responsible for their actions or character, a number of theorists have argued against Peter Strawson’s (and others’) claim that “the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other” would be undermined if we were not morally responsible agents. Among them, Derk Pereboom (2001, 2009) and Tamler Sommers (2007, 2012) most forcefully argue against this conception (...) of love. However, in this paper, I plan to defend the claim that there is an essential connection between love and moral responsibility, a thesis I will call love internalism. To begin, I will specify the content and scope of love internalism, and consider ways in which other theorists have attempted to motivate it. I will then consider the various arguments that Pereboom and Sommers advance against love internalism. These arguments, it seems to me, offer us powerful reasons to reject several of the ways in which philosophers have tried to connect moral responsibility to love. Consequently, in light of these criticisms, I will further precisify the content of love internalism. And as we will see, love internalism (as I argue for it) is immune to Pereboom’s and Sommers’ criticisms. Moreover, when its content is sufficiently clarified, love internalism can serve as a plausible premise in an anti-skeptical argument. I thus conclude by arguing that this suitably reformulated statement of love internalism offers a significant challenge to moral responsibility skepticism of the sort Pereboom and Sommers endorse. (shrink)
The semantic rules governing natural language quantifiers (e.g. "all," "some," "most") neither coincide with nor resemble the semantic rules governing the analogues of those expressions that occur in the artificial languages used by semanticists. Some semanticists, e.g. Peter Strawson, have put forth data-consistent hypotheses as to the identities of the semantic rules governing some natural-language quantifiers. But, despite their obvious merits, those hypotheses have been universally rejected. In this paper, it is shown that those hypotheses are indeed correct. Moreover, (...) data-consistent hypotheses are put forth as to the identities of the semantic rules governing the words "most" and "many," the semantic rules governing which semanticists have thus far been unable to identify. The points made in this paper are anticipated in a paper, published in the same issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, by Andrzej Boguslawski. (shrink)
This volume presents twenty-two uncollected philosophical essays by Sir Peter Strawson, one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. The essays (two of them previously unpublished) are drawn from seven decades of work, from 1949 to 2003. They span the broad range of Strawson's work: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, ethical theory, and history of philosophy, along with metaphilosophical reflections and intellectual autobiography.
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)
I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emotions and their associated behaviors. I offer more sophisticated accounts of punishment, of these emotions and of their associated behaviors that are (...) consistent with Abolitionism, the view that punishment is unjustified. (shrink)
In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers – William G. Lycan, Jeffrey Poland, Galen Strawson, Frances Egan, Georges Rey, Peter Ludlow, Paul ...
The aim of this paper is to derive a perfectly general criterion of identity through time from Locke’s Principle, which says that two things of the same kind cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In this way, the paper pursues a suggestion made by Peter F. Strawson almost thirty years ago in an article called ‘Entity and Identity’. The reason why the potential of this suggestion has so far remained unrealized is twofold: firstly, the suggestion was (...) never properly developed by Strawson, and secondly, it seemed vulnerable to an objection that he himself raised against it. Consequently, the paper’s aim is to further develop Strawson’s suggestion, and to show that the result is not vulnerable to the objection that seemed fatal to its underdeveloped predecessor. In addition, the paper aims to defend Locke’s Principle against alleged counterexamples such as those produced by Leibniz, Fine and Hughes. (shrink)
We are planning agents and we are, or so we suppose, responsible agents. How are these two distinctive aspects of our agency related? In his "Freedom and Resentment" Peter Strawson understands responsible agency in terms of "reactive attitudes" like resentment and gratitude, attitudes which are normally embedded in "ordinary inter-personal relationships." I draw on Strawson''s account to sketch an answer to my question about responsibility and planning. First, the fact that an action is plan-embedded can influence the agent''s degree (...) of culpability for that action; for such embeddings can constitute or indicate important facts about the quality of the agent''s will. Second, general planning incapacities can to some extent exempt an agent from normal judgments of responsibility. My argument for this second claim appeals to the normal roles of planning in "ordinary inter-personal relationships.". (shrink)
The belief that only free will supports assignments of moral responsibility -- deserved praise and blame, punishment and reward, and the expression of reactive attitudes and moral censure -- has fueled most of the historical concern over the existence of free will. Free will's connection to moral responsibility also drives contemporary thinkers as diverse in their substantive positions as Peter Strawson, Thomas Nagel, Peter van Inwagen, Galen Strawson, and Robert Kane. A simple, but powerful, reason for thinking that (...) philosophers are correct in making moral responsibility the prize of the free will problem is this: If we disassociate free will from deserved praise, blame, punishment and reward, reactive attitudes and moral censure, then why care about free will? If free will is not pinned down as that degree of freedom in our choices that we need for moral responsibility, it is difficult to see why anyone would or should care about free will. In this article I argue that some of the most prominent recent writing on free will becomes sidetracked from this key issue. For this reason, a good deal of the literature is so much spilled ink as philosophers misdirect their energies. In section 1 I elaborate just what I believe the key issue in the free will problem is. In section 2 I illustrate what an answer to the key issue requires. In section 3 I suggest motivations for misdirection. In sections 4, 5, and 6 I provide detailed examples of misdirection from compatibilists and libertarians. In sections 7 and 8 I describe some non-misdirected answers to the key question. (shrink)
A companion volume to Free Will: A Philosophical Study , this new anthology collects influential essays on free will, including both well-known contemporary classics and exciting recent work. Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom is divided into three parts. The essays in the first section address metaphysical issues concerning free will and causal determinism. The second section groups papers presenting a positive account of the nature of free action, including competing compatibilist and incompatibilist analyses. The third section (...) concerns free will and moral responsibility, including theories of moral responsibility and the challenge to an alternative possibilities condition posed by Frankurt-type scenarios. Distinguished by its balance and consistently high quality, the volume presents papers selected for their significance, innovation, and clarity of expression. Contributors include Harry Frankfurt, Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Elizabeth Anscombe, John Martin Fischer, Michael Bratman, Roderick Chisholm, Robert Kane, Peter Strawson, and Susan Wolf. The anthology serves as an up-to-date resource for scholars as well as a useful text for courses in ethics, philosophy of religion, or metaphysics. In addition, paired with Free Will: A Philosophical Study, it would form an excellent upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in free will, responsibility, motivation, or action theory. (shrink)
b>: The problem of how physical systems, such as brains, come to represent themselves as subjects in an objective world is addressed. I develop an account of the requirements for this ability that draws on and refines work in a philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through Peter Strawson to Gareth Evans. The basic idea is that the ability to represent oneself as a subject in a world whose existence is independent of oneself involves the ability to represent space, (...) and in particular, to represent oneself as one object among others in an objective spatial realm. In parallel, I provide an account of how this ability, and the mechanisms that support it, are realized neurobiologically. This aspect of the article draws on, and refines, work done in the neurobiology and psychology of egocentric and allocentric spatial representation. (shrink)
The debate on how to interpret Kant's transcendental idealism has been prominent for several decades now. In his book Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism (2004) Kenneth R. Westphal introduces and defends his version of the metaphysical dual-aspect reading. But his real aim lies deeper: to provide a sound transcendental proof for (unqualified) realism, based on Kant's work, without resorting to transcendental idealism. In this sense his aim is similar to that of Peter F. Strawson – although Westphal's approach is (...) far more sophisticated. First he attempts to show that noumenal causation – on the reality of which his argument partly rests – is coherent in and necessary for Kant's transcendental idealism. Westphal then aims to undermine transcendental idealism by two major claims: Kant can neither account for transcendental affinity nor satisfactorily counter Hume's causal scepticism. Finally Westphal defends his alternative for transcendental idealism by showing that it solves these problems and thus offers a genuine transcendental proof for realism. In this paper I will show that all the three steps outlined above suffer from decisive shortcomings, and that consequently, regardless of its merits, Westphal's transcendental argument for realism remains undemonstrated. (shrink)
The dictum that meaning is use, that for a word to have a meaning is for it to have a use, is typically presented as placing emphasis on the public nature of linguistic activity, as appropriately situating the notion of meaning in its characteristic context of communication, and more generally as dissuading us from a Cartesian conception of subjects as essentially cut off from one another in private realms. According to its proponents, the appeal to use promises to de-mystify meaning (...) by suitably re-connecting talk of meaning with the familiar and concrete linguistic practices into which we are naturally habituated. Since its first airing, the claim that meaning is use has gained considerable currency. While perhaps not as popular as it once was, it is fair to say that, in one form or another, it is accepted by many prominent philosophers. Indeed, Brian Loar claims that contemporary ‘theory of meaning is divided into two: truth theories, and use theories’ (2006: 85; cf. Borg 2004: 4).2 It seems, then, that the The use of ‘use’ ‘Homeric struggle’ Peter Strawson famously identified battles on (2004: 132). (shrink)
Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge addresses several issues including Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind and his advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and (...)Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avarmides. (shrink)
This article offers a tentative deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the “modern,” that is, the “Cartesian,” “subject.” It argues that subjectivity, understood as the idea of some “thing” that is both the owner of certain mental states and the agent of certain activities, is a medieval theological construct, based on two conflicting models of the mind (nous, mens) inherited from ancient philosophy and theology: the Aristotelian and the Augustinian (or perichoretic) one, developed in connection with such problems as that of (...) the two wills in the incarnate Christ. Starting with Nietzsche’s criticism of the “superstition of logicians” (the belief that“the subject I is the condition of the predicate think”) and Peter Strawson’s question in Individuals (“Why are one’s states of consciousness ascribed to anything at all?”), the article discusses Peter Olivi’s and Thomas Aquinas’s treatments of the problem, as well as the principle invoked to resolve it: actiones sunt suppositorum, “actions belong to subjects.” Against this background, the discussion refers to Heidegger’s notion of “subjecticity” and Armstrong’s “attribute-theory” in order to reappraise the Hobbesian and Leibnizian contributions to the history of the Self. (shrink)
In 1905, Bertrand Russell published 'On Denoting' in which he proposed and defended a quantificational account of definite descriptions. Forty-five years later, in 'On Referring', Peter Strawson claimed that Russell was mistaken: definite descriptions do not function as quantifiers but (paradigmatically) as referring expressions. Ever since, scores of theorists have attempted to adjudicate this debate. Others have gone beyond the question of the proper analysis of definite descriptions, focusing instead on the complex relations between definites, indefinites, and pronouns. These (...) relations are often examined with attention to the phenomena of scope and anaphora. This collection assembles nineteen new papers on definite descriptions and related topics. The contributors include both philosophers and linguists, many of whom have been active participants in the various debates concerning descriptions. The volume contains a brief general introduction and is divided into six sections, each of which is accompanied by a detailed introduction of its own. Several of the sections concern issues associated with the Russell/Strawson debate. These include the sections on incomplete descriptions, the referential/attributive distinction, and presupposition and truth value gaps. There is also a section on the representation of definites and indefinites in semantic theory, containing papers that reject certain core assumptions of the Russellian paradigm. Linguists interested in definites have traditionally been concerned with how such expressions interact with other expressions, including pronouns and indefinites. They have explored, and continue to explore, these interactions through the complex phenomena of scope and anaphora. In the section dealing with anaphoric pronouns and descriptions, indefinites and dynamic syntax/semantics, five linguists propose and defend their views on these and related issues. Finally, there is a section that concerns the relation between proper names and descriptions and, more particularly, the idea that some names, those introduced into the language by description, are semantically equivalent to definite descriptions. (shrink)
of (from British Columbia Philosophy Graduate Conference) This paper attempts to argue for an interpretation of Peter Strawson�s account of moral responsibility that successfully eliminates the threat of determinism. The goal is to capture the spirit of Strawson�s view and elucidate that spirit. I do this by emphasizing an aspect of Strawson�s account that others, like Paul Russell, may find insignificant, and then I demonstrate how this aspect is meant to quash the threat of determinism. Specifically, I claim that (...) Strawson wishes us to recognize that certain interpersonal relationships are explanatorily prior to the capacities necessary for morally responsible agency, and this explanatory relationship implies that (at least in our world) the capacities necessary for morally responsible agency could not include freedom from determinism. (shrink)
Peter Strawson holds that on a proper conception of personhood, the problem of Other Minds does not arise. I suggest that the viability of his proposal depends on a particular account of person perception. I argue that neither the theory theory nor the simulation theory of mindreading constitutes a suitable basis for this account. I then go on to defend Peter Hobson's notion of 'feeling perception' as an intersubjectivist alternative that, if properly developed, delivers a basis for a (...) viable account of person perception. In developing that alternative, I draw on John Campbell's suggestion that self-understanding is constituted, in part, by an understanding of oneself as a cause of many events. (shrink)
As an undergraduate from 1964 to 1967, Gareth Evans, a British philosopher of language and mind, studied for the PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) at University College, Oxford, where his philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He was then a Senior Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford (1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar visiting Harvard and Berkeley (1968–69). In 1968, less than a year after completing his degree, Evans was elected to a Fellowship at University College. He took up the position (...) in 1969, succeeding Strawson who had become Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. During the 1970s, Evans and his University College colleague John McDowell played leading roles in developing a distinctive conception of truth-theoretic semantics, drawing on the work of Strawson, Michael Dummett, and especially Donald Davidson. Their co-edited collection, Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, appeared in 1976. While philosophy of language enjoyed a central position in Oxford philosophy of that period, Evans did not share the view (regarded by Dummett as constitutive of analytic philosophy) that philosophy of language is foundational and so takes priority over philosophy of mind in the order of philosophical explanation. He attached particular importance to the mentalistic notion of understanding, and his work on the theory of reference was set within a theory of thought and especially thought about particular objects. Evans’s published work ranged over philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. In 1979 he was elected to the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. He died in August 1980, at the age of thirtyfour. His book, The Varieties of Reference (1982), incomplete at the time of his death, was edited and brought to publication by McDowell. A collection of thirteen of his papers and two shorter notes appeared in 1985 and a further note was published in 2004.. (shrink)
A certain interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certaintyadvanced by such figures as Hilary Putnam, Peter Strawson, Avrum Stroll and Crispin Wrighthas become common currency in the recent literature. In particular, this reading focuses upon the supposed anti-sceptical import of the Wittgensteinian notion of a “hinge” proposition. In this paper it is argued that this interpretation is flawed both on the grounds that there is insufficient textual support for this reading and that, in any case, it leads to unpalatable (...) philosophical problems. Moreover, it is claimed that the popularity of this construal of On Certainty in the contemporary debate reflects an implicit commitment to the contentious doctrine of epistemological internalism. Nevertheless, it is argued that, suitably modified along the epistemologically externalist lines suggested by Michael Williams, one might be able to resurrect a viable anti-sceptical hinge proposition thesis. Furthermore, it is claimed that such a conception of the notion also receives some, albeit inconclusive, textual support from On Certainty. (shrink)
[Bibliographic article focussing on compatibilist approaches to responsibility.] Moral responsibility relates to many significant topics in ethics and metaphysics, such as the content and scope of moral obligations, the nature of human agency, and the structure of human interaction. This entry focuses on compatibilist approaches to moral responsibility—that is, approaches that see moral responsibility as compatible with the causal order of the world. This is partly because they have more to say about the nature of moral responsibility and the practices (...) associated with it, and also because there is a seperate entry on free will. The entry also focuses mainly on the debates considered most significant by contemporary analytic philosophers. However, it also points to some earlier contributions and to some significant contributions from outside those debates. In particular, it is interesting that contemporary debates often focus on the agency of the responsible person, without attending to the forms of interaction that person may participate in. However, as Peter Strawson points out in a seminal essay (see Responsibility and the Reactive Sentiments), moral responsibility is intimately related to our reactions to one another. Should those reactions be understood by reference to features of the person held responsible, or by reference to the relationship between persons where some action or outcome is at issue, or even by reference to wider social and political structures? Moral responsibility also borders on a number of topics of great practical importance. These include responsibility under the law, the responsibilities of groups and organizations, accountability within organizations, and how distributive justice and individual responsibility are related. Again, this entry focuses largely on individual moral responsibility and only mentions a few social and legal discussions of responsibility with especial implications for how we think about individual responsibility. (shrink)
This volume presents twenty of the most important interviews the journal, Cogito conducted between 1987 and 1996. Covering a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry, from logic to metaphysics to philosophy of mind, the interviews provide an excellent introduction to philosophy in the English speaking world at the end of the century. Interviews with: Michael Dummett Peter Strawson Alasdair MacIntyre David Gauthier Nancy Cartwright Mary Warnock Hilary Putnam Daniel Dennett Bernard Williams John Cottingham Willard Quine Stephen Korner Hugh Mellor Adam (...) Morton Jean Hampton Roger Scruton Richard Dawkins Richard Sorabji Derek Parfit Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)
In his critique of aesthetic individualism, R.G. Collingwood provides an account of persons that anticipates the post-Wittgensteinians; notably, Peter Strawson, Daniel Dennett, and Annette Baier. According to this view, persons emerge in the midst of other persons. This process is always unfinished and ongoing throughout one's life. One difficulty with this perspective is the problem of firstness: if persons are essentially second persons or one's personhood is contingent upon other persons, how could there be a first person or early (...) persons? One solution to this problem is to employ the notion of family or community. This solution can be found in both Collingwood and Baier.After this discussion,we look at his autobiography for evidence of his own 'discoveries' of personhood. There is tension here because he was a rebel and a loner, but there were a few (but not many) good relationships that confirm or exemplify his view of persons in his own life. Also briefly addressed is how this view fits into his theories of history and art. (shrink)
“In space”, declared the posters for the 1979 movie Alien, in a deliberately disconcerting juxtaposition, “no-one can hear you scream.” Yet even the space that lies beyond the earth is not utterly silent – stars and planets themselves produce sounds that radiate through the rarefied gases lying between them, although the wavelengths produced lie far beyond the range of human hearing. There are, then, not even in the spaces between the planets and the stars, any truly silent spaces, and merely (...) to be present in a space, no matter the nature of the space in question, is already to disturb that space in multiple ways – such disturbance typically being manifest acoustically no less than visually. Yet often we tend to conceptualise space and spatial presence in terms that actually give priority to the visual over the acoustic, and even to neglect the spatial character of the acoustic altogether. A classic example of this is to be found in the work of the British philosopher Peter Strawson who famously proposed, as a kind of thought-experiment, the idea of what he called a ‘No-Space world’ that was constituted in purely auditory terms, and was for just this reason taken to be a non-spatial world. 1.. (shrink)
This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin (...) Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition. (shrink)
A significant methodological difference between analytic and continental philosophers comes out in their differing attitudes to transcendental reasoning. It has been an object of concern to analytic philosophy since the dawn of the movement around the start of the twentieth century, and although there was briefly a mini-industry on the validity of transcendental arguments following Peter Strawson’s prominent use of them, discussion of their acceptability – usually with a negative verdict – is far more common than their positive use (...) within a philosophical system or to justify a specific claim. By contrast, in the continental traditions starting with Kant but enduring throughout the twentieth century and beyond, some form of transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous, notwithstanding that what one means by the transcendental is significantly reconfigured by phenomenology, and then the genealogical turn, as well as by a more constructivist understanding of philosophy. Concerns about the status of transcendental reasoning certainly exist for continental philosophers, but continued creative use persists, and there is no general agreement that transcendental argumentation is especially problematic. In fact, it is more commonly claimed, and it is certainly frequently implied, that a transcendental dimension is of the essence of philosophy. Any philosophical activity that does not reflect on its own conditions of possibility is naïve, or pre-critical, and the sometimes pilloried continental enquiries into the ‘problem of modernity’ are but one way of attempting to reflect on the conditions of contemporary philosophical discourse, subjectivity, and cultural life more generally. Much of this chapter will hence be concerned to offer both an explicit and implicit rationale for the divergent attitudes of analytic and continental philosophers vis-à-vis transcendental reasoning. We give an incomplete account of what transcendental arguments are, review the major analytic criticisms of them, gesture towards some of the recent continental appropriations of such arguments (focusing on the themes of embodiment and time), consider the extent to which analytic criticisms apply to such usages, and attempt to bring to the fore the differing explanatory norms that justify these divergent practices. (shrink)
What is meaning? How is linguistic communication possible? What is the nature of language? What is the relationship between language and the world? How do metaphors work? The Philosophy of Language, considered the essential text in its field, is an excellent introduction to such fundamental questions. This revised edition collects forty-six of the most important articles in the field, making it the most up-to-date and comprehensive volume on the subject. Revised to address changing trends and contemporary developments, the fifth edition (...) features seven new articles including influential work by Mark Crimmins, Gottlob Frege, David Kaplan, Frederick Kroon, W. V. Quine, and Robert Stalnaker (two essays). Other selections include classic articles by such distinguished philosophers as J. L. Austin, John Stuart Mill, Hilary Putnam, Bertrand Russell, John R. Searle, and P. F. Strawson. The selections represent evolving and varying approaches to the philosophy of language, with many articles building upon earlier ones or critically discussing them. Eight sections cover the central issues: Truth and Meaning; Speech Acts; Reference and Descriptions; Names and Demonstratives; Propositional Attitudes; Metaphor and Pretense; Interpretation and Translation; and The Nature of Language. A general introduction and introductions to each section give students background to the issues and explain the connections between them. A list of suggested further reading follows each section. (shrink)
In this paper I will try to argue for a new version in philosophy entitled as Philosophical Topology. It is inspired by the thought of Peter Strawson as well as ones of some of so-called Continental philosophers like Heidgger. Unlike any of metaphilosophy in general, the philosophical topology focuses rather on analyses of processes of make-up in philosophers’ thinking, especially by revealing the internal logic of philosophical ideas in making and processing in order to explain the intrinsic continuation of (...) philosophical ideas in particular philosophers’ thinking. In this sense the philosophical topology is not one of philosophical methods but a new branch in philosophy that is characterized as being concerned with continuation of ideas as its basic task. So, in this way, it is available to analyses of various doctrines in philosophy. Main issues in the philosophical topology are as follows: 1) to analyze the internal law-likes in the development of philosophy with the perspective of topology; 2) to interpret the general routes of Western philosophy in terms of the philosophical topology; 3) to view the philosophical topology as a way to inquire into metaphysics; 4) to deal properly with the relation of the philosophical topology to other branches in contemporary philosophy such as the philosophy of language, of logic, of science and ethics. (shrink)
Sixteen obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy: Peter Birks; Lord Dacre of Glanton; William Frend; John Gallagher; Philip Grierson; Stuart Hampsire; William McKane; Sir Malcolm Pasley; Ben Pimlott; Robert Pring-Mill; John Stevens, Peter Strawson; Sir William Wade; Alan Williams; Sir Bernard Williams and John Wymer.
Confounding earlier predictions of naysayers and sceptics, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, metaphysics had re-emerged for the first time in decades as a vital, progressive and exciting branch of philosophy. Although the most strident criticisms came from early analytic philosophers such as Carnap, it is analytical metaphysics that has led the way. But rather than trace the stages of the revival of metaphysics, we consider a spread of contemporary themes which have been especially fruitful in expanding the circle (...) of metaphysical discussion from its modest beginnings at the hands of Strawson and Quine in mid-century. The topics are divided into four groups: Expanding the Toolbox; Ontological Speculations; Systematics; and Applications. (shrink)
In this paper I sketch an account of moral blame and blameworthiness. I begin by clarifying what I take blame to be and explaining how blameworthiness is to be analyzed in terms of it. I then consider different accounts of the conditions of blameworthiness and, in the end, settle on one according to which a person is blameworthy for φ-ing just in case, in φ-ing, she violates one of a particular class of moral requirements governing the attitudes we bear, and (...) our mental orientation, toward people and other objects of significant moral worth. These requirements embody the moral stricture that we accord to these others a sufficient level of respect, one that their moral worth demands. This is a familiar theme which has its roots in P. F. Strawson’s pioneering views on moral responsibility. My development of it leads me to the conclusion that acting wrongly is not a condition of blameworthiness: violating a moral requirement to perform, or refrain from performing, an action is neither necessary nor sufficient for being blameworthy. All we are ever blameworthy for, I will argue, are certain aspects of our mental bearing toward others. We can be said to be blameworthy for our actions only derivatively, in the sense that those actions are the natural manifestations of the things for which we are strictly speaking blameworthy. (shrink)
The ‘New Hume’ interpretation, which sees Hume as a realist about ‘thick’ Causal powers, has been largely motivated by his evident commitment to causal language and causal science. In this, however, it is fundamentally misguided, failing to recognise how Hume exploits his anti-realist conclusions about (upper-case) Causation precisely to support (lower-case) causal science. When critically examined, none of the standard New Humean arguments — familiar from the work of Wright, Craig, Strawson, Buckle, Kail, and others — retains any significant force (...) against the plain evidence of Hume's; texts. But the most devastating objection comes from Hume's own applications of his analysis of causation, to the questions of ‘the immateriality of the soul’ and ‘liberty and necessity’. These show that the New Hume interpretation has misunderstood the entire purpose of his ‘Chief Argument’, and presented him as advocating some of the very positions he is arguing most strongly against. (shrink)
Is Hume, or is he not, a realist about what Galen Strawson calls “Causation” (with a capital “C”) and Simon Blackburn calls “thick connexions”, that is, necessary connexions between events that go beyond functional relations of regular succession? With this “New Hume” debate now in its third decade, one might feel entitled to wonder whether there is any determinate answer to be had. Both sides have found plenty of Humean quotations to throw at their opponents, passages which taken in isolation (...) might appear to settle the question in their favour. At the same time, both sides have been able to construct plausible accounts of why their opponents’ favoured quotations lack the force that they initially appear to have, and some of these accounts have been not only plausible but philosophically illuminating, unearthing subtle complexities in Hume’s thought which promise – whatever the eventual outcome of the debate – to leave Hume scholarship much richer than had the debate never arisen. This might suggest that the appropriate response is to give up the quest for a definitive answer, to see partial truth on both sides, and to acknowledge that Hume’s thought contains an unresolved tension, with strains both of realism and antirealism about Causation.1 But such a reaction, though natural, would I believe be premature, for two related reasons, concerning respectively the importance to Hume of his theory of causation, and its intimate – but sometimes under-explored – relationships with other aspects of his thought. (shrink)
During the middle of the twentieth century, maybe until about 1960 or 1970, it was generally agreed, by analytic philosophers, that pretty much all intellectually responsible philosophy was, quite as it should be, a discipline whose practitioners offered no substantial claims about the general nature of concrete reality or, at the least, none distinctively arrived at through their involvement with philosophy. This was in marked contrast with the natural sciences (and, presumably most markedly, with the more general of the natural (...) sciences, providing only that some of the sciences, say physics, should be more general than others, say chemistry.)[i] So it was, during the heyday of so-called “ordinary language philosophy,” the last period when Britain was, at least arguably, the center of philosophical influence, at least on the English-speaking world. It was a time, maybe the last time, that Oxford was the single most influential center of Anglophone philosophical activity, featuring such faculty as J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle, and (the somewhat more systematic) H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson. And, it was a time - way back then, it was - when (the later) Wittgenstein was still a quite influential figure in the field, even if, perhaps, his influence was, by then, rather more indirect than in the just previous decades, when he was still alive. Or, at the very least, Wittgenstein was still, in those old days, far more of a then-currently influential thinker than a then-merely-historical-figure, a situation which has become the reverse of that, of course, during the last few decades. In a phrase at once nicely nostalgic and perversely ironic, those were the bad old days. (shrink)
