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P. F. Strawson

Analytic · Europe · 1919 to 2006

English philosopher who argued that radical doubt cannot get started, because thinking already assumes lasting objects and other people.

What it is

Peter Strawson (1919 to 2006) was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at Oxford, where he held a chair of metaphysical philosophy from 1968 to 1987. He wrote on logic, language, metaphysics, knowledge and the history of philosophy. His guiding aim was to uncover the most basic concepts built into our ordinary ways of thinking, such as those of body, person, space and time, and cause, and to show that sceptical doubts about them fail.

He made his name in 1950 with "On Referring", a reply to Bertrand Russell, and followed it with books on logic, on metaphysics, on Kant and on subject and predicate. After a spell as a captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in the war, he went back to Oxford. His son Galen Strawson is also a philosopher.

The main ideas

  • Descriptive metaphysics. In Individuals he separated "descriptive metaphysics", which sets out the structure of the way we actually think about the world, from "revisionary metaphysics", which tries to replace it with a better one. He took the first as his task.
  • Basic concepts. He argued that ideas such as person, body, space, time and cause are so basic to our thought that sceptical challenges against them cannot get a grip.
  • Reference. In "On Referring" he criticised Russell's theory of descriptions, and defended the central claim of that paper for the rest of his career.
  • Truth. He took issue with Austin's reconstruction of the correspondence theory of truth.
  • Freedom. He offered a famous answer to the dilemma of determinism, the worry that if everything is determined, no one is morally responsible.
  • Kant. In The Bounds of Sense he read Kant's first Critique as an essay on the limits of what we can sensibly think.

What it looks like in practice

Consider that you take for granted that the world holds lasting things, such as other people who exist when you are not looking at them. Strawson would say that this belief is not a theory you could replace by another, but part of the framework within which any theory is stated, and that this is what a philosopher should describe. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • An Introduction to Logical Theory (1952) is his first book, on formal logic.
  • Individuals (1959) is the book of descriptive metaphysics.
  • The Bounds of Sense (1966) is an essay on Kant.
  • Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (1974) is his most ambitious and least noticed book, in his own view.

Questions and criticism

  • Is describing enough? Describing our basic ways of thinking invites the objection that they might be wrong, even if we cannot do without them.
  • Who was right about reference? It is fair to ask whether Strawson or Russell gave the better account of how a phrase can refer to something.
  • A neglected book. He himself thought his book on subject and predicate was ambitious, and it is fair to ask why it received so little attention.

Close neighbours

Bertrand Russell and J. L. Austin are the two thinkers he argued with most directly, and Immanuel Kant is the thinker whose work he read in The Bounds of Sense. The page on Gilbert Ryle shows a fellow member of the Oxford philosophy of his day.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Immanuel Kant · His study of Kant's first Critique shaped his account of the basic frame of thought.

Reacted against

  • Bertrand Russell · His paper "On Referring" attacked Russell's theory of descriptions.

Other Analytic thinkers

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