P. F. Strawson 1919 – 2006
Sir Peter Frederick Strawson was a British analytic philosopher and a long-standing fellow of University College, Oxford. His paper On Referring criticized Russell's theory of descriptions, and his Individuals produced a descriptive metaphysics that took persons and material bodies as the basic particulars of our conceptual scheme. The Bounds of Sense reread Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as a sustained inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of any coherent experience of an objective world. His essay Freedom and Resentment recovered the moral significance of the reactive attitudes against consequentialist accounts of responsibility.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to P. F. Strawson:
“Persons are the basic particulars of our conceptual scheme.”
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Attributed to P. F. Strawson:
“Reactive attitudes are the foundation of moral life.”
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Attributed to P. F. Strawson:
“Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world.”
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Attributed to P. F. Strawson:
“It is no use looking for a transcendental deduction in the form of a knock-down argument.”
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Attributed to P. F. Strawson:
“Moral responsibility is rooted in our actual practices of reaction and demand.”