Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (University Paperbacks; Up) by P.F. Strawson (PDF)

Description

Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson’s most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson’s now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances.Throughout, Individuals advances some highly influential and controversial ideas, such as ‘non-solipsistic consciousness’ and the concept of a person a ‘primitive concept’

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I hesitate to critique a work as profound and exquisitely reasoned as Prof. Strawson’s “Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics,” but his thesis that the concept of a person necessarily entails the concept of an entity with a material body is one with which I cannot agree. Now I am completely on board with his doctrine of the primitiveness of the concept of a person to our common conceptual scheme and its ontic corollary that material bodies and persons are the basic particulars of that scheme. Where I take issue with Prof. Strawson is his insistence that the concept of a person is unintelligible unless that concept includes the possession of a material, recognizably human, body or–in the case of deceased persons–a former body.In the first place, the thesis is historically inaccurate. Our linguistic ancestors started talking about minds, spirits, ghosts, and souls long before the first mention of the word ‘person’. The works of Homer and the authors of the Old Testament Bible make explicit reference to the souls of the dead, the ghosts of the netherworld, the antics of the gods and the mind of God, and the spirit world generally many centuries before the concept of a person–and the word itself–came into general use. The point being that ghosts, souls, minds, and spirits were DEFINED AS immaterial beings. Yes, they were pictured and characterized as having bodily attributes, but their supernatural power came from the fact that they could assume, alter, or discard their material bodies at will. The primitive memes that eventually came to make up the concept of a person were all originally introduced as bodiless entities, so it cannot be the case that our modern concept of a person as a basic particular REQUIRES that a person have a material body.Secondly, our modern concept of a person seems to have religious or at least semi-religious origins. Our modern English word ‘person’ appears to have had its origins in classical Greek theater where the word ‘prosopon’ referred to the masks worn by actors to represent the various characters they played on the stage. The word was adopted by the Romans to become the Latin term ‘persona’ meaning not just mask but the entire role and character that the actor brought to the play. Later, during the Trinitarian debates of the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the Church fathers were searching for a way to emphasize the humanity of Jesus Christ while at the same time insisting on his divine nature in common with God the Father. It was agreed that the theatrical term ‘persona’ best captured what they were trying to convey in the different roles that God the Father and God the Son had played in the salvation drama. The term was later extended to the Holy Ghost, the angels, and then to all human beings, based mainly on the insight that the concept of a person contained a profoundly spiritual element.The fact that we already had a vocabulary of concepts like mind, will, soul, and ghost to flesh out, so to speak, the newly coined concept of personhood proves (to me at least) that having a physical body was and is neither necessary nor sufficient to being a person. Thus Prof. Strawson is quite right to insist that persons are basic particulars in our common conceptual scheme but wrong to insist that possessing a material body is a logically necessary condition of personhood. If it were, a large and important part of that scheme would be rendered meaningless, and that would be revisionary metaphysics at its worst.

⭐Essential. A must read for anyone interested in what modern philosophy is.

⭐Important text by a leading analytical philosopherrequired reading forall philosophy students and others interestedin the development of conceptual philosophy

⭐P. F. Strawson is a first-rate philosopher, and this work, “Individuals,” is one of the must-read books of 20th Century for any philosopher interested in metaphysics.

⭐Arrived very quickly! Completely satisfied!

⭐Tempted to buy based on the previews and the reviews but this does very much read as an over-arching explanation of what Wittgenstein expounded upon in language-games, and between the 2 I’d rather read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations replete with examples than something which seems like a derivative explanation thereof. By Wittgenstein’s examples you are observing the same concepts of reidentifying and particularity in varying reference. Almost bought but since Wittgenstein precedes this publication this seems a bit too repetitive for my dollars.

⭐Ottimo libro 🙂

⭐

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