Abstract

It will come as a surprise to many to see a book coming from a contemporary Oxford philosopher claiming to be metaphysical. The author, in the last sentence of the last chapter, justifies his title with the remark: “So if metaphysics is the finding of reasons, good, bad or indifferent, for what we believe on instinct, then this has been metaphysics.” This remark gives us the point of the qualification “descriptive”, which is for Strawson, opposed to “revisionary” when applied to metaphysics. The revisionary metaphysician is trying to produce a better set of basic concepts about the world, the descriptive metaphysician is content to describe “the actual structure of our thought”.