Sir Peter Strawson

Sir Peter Strawson was a British philosopher who was a leading member of the ordinary language school of analytic philosophy during the 1950s and ’60s. His work was instrumental in reviving interest in metaphysics within Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy in the mid-20th century.

After graduating from St. John’s College at Oxford in 1940, Strawson served in the British military during World War II. In 1947, on the recommendation of Gilbert Ryle, he was appointed to a lectureship at University College, Oxford; he was elected a fellow the following year. In 1968 he was elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford—replacing Ryle, who had retired—and moved to the university’s Magdalen College, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. He also held numerous visiting professorships in the United States.

Strawson first came to prominence with two papers: “Truth” (1949), in which he attacked the complex correspondence theory of his Oxford colleague J.L. Austin, and “On Referring” (1950), in which he criticized the widely accepted theory of definite descriptions put forward by Bertrand Russell in “On Denoting” (1905). Russell’s analysis had entailed that a sentence such as “The present king of France is bald” is meaningful but false, because there is no present king of France. Strawson claimed that such a sentence is meaningful but neither true nor false, because its presupposition—that there is a present king of France—is false; he thus challenged the widely held view that every indicative sentence is either true or false.

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Because of their generally empirical orientation, adherents of ordinary language philosophy (which was based on the examination of nontechnical uses of philosophical terms in everyday language) tended to view metaphysics with skepticism if not outright scorn. Strawson’s work Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959) helped to change this perception by showing how ordinary language analysis could shed light on traditional metaphysical questions. In The Bounds of Sense (1966), Strawson attempted to determine how much of the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed. 1787) could be plausibly defended. His arguably uncharitable assessment of Kant’s transcendental idealism nevertheless inspired much new Anglo-American scholarship on Kant in subsequent decades.

Strawson’s other publications included Introduction to Logical Theory (1952); Freedom and Resentment (1974), a collection of essays; Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (1974); Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985); and Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (1992). He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1960 and knighted in 1977.