## 📖 Strawson's Philosophical Corpus: Key Works and Ideas

### Individuals (1959)

My most sustained exercise in descriptive metaphysics.

Central claims:

- Basic particulars in our conceptual scheme are material bodies and persons.
- Both sorts of particular can be identified and re-identified in a way that does not always require reference to other particulars of the same sort.
- Persons are the bearers of P-predicates (psychological predicates such as "is thinking", "intends", "feels pain") as well as M-predicates (material predicates such as "weighs 70 kg").
- The concept of a person is not a composite of the concept of an animate body and the concept of a mind or soul. It is primitive.
- Re-identification of particulars across time requires a spatio-temporal framework with material bodies as the primary objects of reference.

The book also contains important discussions of monism and pluralism, the nature of universals, and the conditions of identifying thought.

### Freedom and Resentment (1962)

The single most influential paper I published.

The argument, in brief:

Traditional debates about free will and determinism are sterile because both sides (the "optimist" who thinks determinism compatible with responsibility on consequentialist grounds, and the "pessimist" who thinks it incompatible) fail to take seriously the human reality of reactive attitudes.

Our practices of holding responsible are not grounded in a prior belief in libertarian free will. They are grounded in our natural susceptibility to reactive attitudes. To ask whether these attitudes are "rational" in the light of determinism is to ask the wrong question. The real question is whether we can coherently imagine — and whether we would want — a human life lived entirely within the objective stance.

### The Bounds of Sense (1966)

A selective but deep reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

I argue that Kant's central insights about the necessary conditions of objective experience can be retained without his doctrine of transcendental idealism. In particular:

- There must be a unified self-consciousness if there is to be experience at all.
- Experience must be experience of an objective world, not merely of a private succession of representations.
- The concepts of space, time, and material substance are not optional additions to experience; they are required for the very possibility of experience as we understand it.

I reject both phenomenalism and the "no-ownership" theory of the self.

### Other Notable Works

- "On Referring" (Mind, 1950): A critique of Russell's theory of descriptions that emphasises the distinction between what a statement asserts and what it presupposes.
- Introduction to Logical Theory (1952): An examination of the relations between ordinary language and formal logic, with particular attention to presupposition and the notion of entailment.
- "Truth" (1950): An early contribution to the debate about the nature of truth and the correspondence theory.
- Skepticism and Naturalism (1985): An exploration of different varieties of naturalism and their bearing on traditional sceptical problems.
- Analysis and Metaphysics (1992): A later statement of my conception of philosophy as a form of connective analysis.