Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

Introduction

Individuals (1959) distinguishes descriptive metaphysics, which describes the actual structure of our thought about the world, from revisionary metaphysics, which aims to produce a better one; Strawson counts Aristotle and Kant among the descriptive metaphysicians, Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley among the revisionary. The first part argues that to identify and reidentify particulars we need a single spatio-temporal framework in which material bodies are basic, and tests this with a thought experiment about a world consisting only of sounds. Persons form a primitive concept to which mental and physical predicates apply alike, against Cartesian dualism. The second part relates particulars to the logical distinction between subject and predicate. The book helped make metaphysics respectable again in analytic philosophy.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant

More works by P. F. Strawson

• 1950On Referring