By the time of his death in 2006, Sir Peter Strawson was regarded as one of the world's most distinguished philosophers. First published thirty years ago but long since unavailable, _Freedom and Resentment_ collects some of Strawson's most important work and is an ideal introduction to his thinking on such topics as the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics. Beginning with the title essay _Freedom and Resentment_, this invaluable collection is testament to the astonishing range of (...) Strawson's thought as he discusses free will, ethics and morality, logic, the mind-body problem and aesthetics. The book is perhaps best-known for its three interrelated chapters on perception and the imagination, subjects now at the very forefront of philosophical research. This reissue includes a substantial new foreword by Paul Snowdon and a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Strawson. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “The Persons”.

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 The essays (two of them previously unpublished) are drawn from seven decades of work, from 1949 to 2003.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.

In these elegant, accessible, and provocative lectures, Sir Peter Strawson considers the prospects for a unified approach to apparently diverse philosophical debates. In each debate one side is skeptical, in a broad sense of the term that includes denial as well as doubt, while the other holds a more liberal or commonsense position. The unified approach comes into play by asking, for each debate, whether we could actually occupy both sides. If one side promotes a position we could (...) only feign to believe, because we are by nature incapable of really believing it, the position is to be rejected without refutation. If, on the other hand, we could maintain either side of the debate, they are both retained by means of a relativizing move which neutralizes their apparent incompatibility. Thus, the naturalistic approach Strawson here explores consists of endorsing exactly as much as we can really believe, ruling out what is beyond belief, however strong the arguments for it may appear, and ruling in both believable sides of a debate, though they may at first seem incompatible. (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.

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)

In 1956, a series of BBC radio talks was published in London under the title The Revolution in Philosophy . This short book included papers by prominent British philosophers of the day, such as Sir Alfred Ayer and Sir Peter Strawson, with an introduction by Gilbert Ryle. Although there is precious little in it concerning the precise nature of the ‘revolution’ alluded to in the title, it is quite clear that these lectures were meant to celebrate in an (...) insular manner the birth of ‘analytic philosophy’ at the hands of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The use of the word ‘revolution’ to describe the birth of ‘analytical philosophy’ and its rise to near complete dominance in the British universities thus carries with it connotations of a forcible substitution of one philosophical order by a new one that itself owed nothing to the past. To me, however, this talk of ‘revolution’ carries with it a false view of the history of British philosophy: it isn’t ‘historical’ at all, just ideological; it was introduced for a strategic purpose, namely that of encouraging new generations of students to avoid reading the work of earlier philosophers or becoming interested in the problems that concerned them. I shall sketch the broad outlines of a landscape that involves, when limited to the specific topic of the theory of knowledge, no radical break, where no entirely new order replaces an older one: the options, so to speak, and even some of the arguments are the same before and after the soi-disant ‘revolution’. (shrink)

This slim volume derives from the John Locke Lectures delivered in Oxford in 1991 and expands and develops the themes presented there and in a series of influential articles published during the last decade and a half. McDowell offers the prospect of "re-enchanting" a world laid bare by reductive "bald" naturalism, drawing support in this effort from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. Others who feature prominently are Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Richard Rorty, and Sir Peter Strawson.

The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.

I expressed agreement with Unger's view of the essential\nnature of personal identity, but dissented from what I took\nto be his view of the value we attach to its preservation;\nsaying, for example, that, in common, I think with many\nothers, I would prefer being replaced or succeeded' by a\nnumerically distinct continuator' with "qualitatively"\nidentical memories and mental and physical characteristics\nto surviving as the "numerically" identical person with\nsevere impairment of memory and abilities.

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)

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. In this book, one of the most distinguished of living philosophers, assuming no previous knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader, sets out to explain and illustrate a (...) certain conception of the nature of analytical philosophy. Strawson draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed what he regards as the most productive route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking. Among the distinctive features of his exposition are the displacement of an older, reductive conception of philosophical method in favor of elucidating the interconnections between the complex but irreducible notions which form the basic structure of our thinking; and the demonstration that the three traditionally distinguished departments of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic are but three aspects of one unified enquiry. Strawson has produced an elegant work that will be invaluable to students and stimulating for professional philosophers and general readers alike. (shrink)

Previously published: London: Methuen, 1975.

First published in 1952, professor’s Strawson’s highly influential _Introduction_ _to Logical Theory_ provides a detailed examination of the relationship between the behaviour of words in common language and the behaviour of symbols in a logical system. He seeks to explain both the exact nature of the discipline known as Formal Logic, and also to reveal something of the intricate logical structure of ordinary unformalised discourse.

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Bounds of Sense is one of the most influential books ever written about Kant’s philosophy, and is one of the key philosophical works of the late Twentieth century. Although it is probably best known for its criticism of Kant’s transcendental idealism, it is also famous for the highly original manner in which Strawson defended and developed some of Kant’s fundamental insights into the nature of subjectivity, experience and knowledge. The book had a profound effect on the interpretation of (...) Kant’s philosophy when it was first published in 1966 and continues to influence discussion of Kant, the soundness of transcendental arguments, and debates in epistemology and metaphysics generally. (shrink)

Referindo-se ao capítulo 6 da minha Introduction to Logical Theory, o professor Calabria demonstra de modo correto e sistemático que, tal como exposta, a doutrina da pressuposição implica uma concepção da lógica que é substancialmente desviante tanto no que diz respeito à lógica tradicional como à lógica moderna clássica.