Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

Sir Peter Strawson (1919-2006) was one of the leading British philosophers of his generation and an influential figure in a golden age for British philosophy between 1950 and 1970.

Individuals, his most important book, is a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it presents Strawson’s now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics. Rather than setting out to replace our overall view of the world, in the manner of the great ’revisionary’ philosophers of the past, Strawson sets himself the seemingly (but not actually) more modest task of simply describing it. The aim is nothing less than to lay bare the most basic structure of our thought--the most general features of the way in which we think about particular things. A landmark book in the philosophical world and above all analytical philosophy, it remains of vital importance today.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a substantial new Foreword by Michelle Montague, setting out some of Strawson’s key themes and arguments. Also included is Strawson’s essay ’Individuals’. Published thirty-five years after the book itself and until now not widely available, it sees Strawson summarizing and reflecting on some of the key arguments presented in his book of the same name.

P. F. Strawson was born in London in 1919. After serving as a captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during World War Two he was appointed a fellow of University College Oxford in 1948. He first gained philosophical fame at the age of 29 in 1950, when he criticised Bertrand Russell’s renowned Theory of Descriptions for failing to do justice to the richness of ordinary language. He was Waynflete Professor at Oxford from 1968-1987 and was knighted in 1977. He died in 2006.