Sir Peter Strawson
Prime philosopher of Oxford's golden age, and champion of both the richness of ordinary language and of natural beliefJane O'Grady
The Guardian, Wednesday 15 February 2006
Oxford was the world capital of philosophy between 1950 and 1970, and American academics flocked there, rather than the traffic going the other way. That golden age had no greater philosopher than Sir Peter Strawson, who has died aged 86.
He was Waynflete professor at Oxford from 1968 to 1987, and was knighted in 1977; but 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. Strawson, an intellectual prize-fighter, soon took on the Oxford ordinary language philosopher, JL Austin, and the American giant of logic, Willard van Orman Quine.
Strawson, even more than Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, insisted on the richness and ineluctability of ordinary language and natural beliefs. In Individuals (1959) and The Bounds of Sense (1966), he sought to give a rational account of beliefs "stubbornly held ... at a primitive level of reflection"; these, even if rejected, or apparently rejected, by philosophers "at a more sophisticated level of reflection", are what we are all "naturally and inescapably committed to".
From meticulous analysis of how humans actually describe the world, Strawson spun what he called "descriptive metaphysics" at a time when metaphysics was anathema, and so helped transform the strictures of positivism and linguistic analysis into the more comprehensive and metaphysical philosophy of the 1960s.
Strawson was born in Ealing, west London, and brought up in Finchley by his parents, who were both teachers. He was educated at Christ's College, Finchley, won a state scholarship and, in 1937, aged 17, went up to St John's College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, specialising in logic and the philosophy of Kant.
He left in 1940 with a disappointing degree, and joined first the Royal Artillery, and then, in 1942, the newly formed Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Much of his war was spent working on radar. Before being posted to Italy with the occupying army, he married his long-term girlfriend Grace Hall Martin, "probably the most judicious action of my life".
Strawson became assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University College of North Wales in 1946. A year later he won the John Locke scholarship at Oxford, and the then Waynflete professor, Gilbert Ryle, who was impressed with his prize-winning essay, recommended the young man to University College, where he became a college lecturer, and, in 1948, a fellow.
Ryle, then editor of Mind, was soon impressed with reports of Strawson's lectures, and asked to publish one. On Referring, published in Mind in 1950, attacked Russell's On Denoting (1905). Russell had claimed that any sentence referring to non-existent or contradictory entities (such as unicorns, round squares, or the king of France) can be logically analysed into an assertion that a particular thing exists and has certain properties - the sentence turns out to be simply false.
But Strawson argued that sentences are not in themselves true or false, simply meaningful; it is the statements that they are used to make that are true or false. "The King of France is wise" could have been used to make a true or a false statement during the years of the French monarchy, but after France became a republic, the sentence "The King of France is wise" used in a fairy story, historical legend, or joke, did not give rise to a question of truth or falsity.
Strawson said Russell had failed to distinguish between a sentence and a statement, and had confused referring or mentioning with meaning. Merely by implying that someone existed, Russell had presupposed his existence. He had distorted the nature of how "we actually use and understand" language in an attempt to squash its complexity into uniform usage.
Strawson had struck a blow for ordinary language logic. Formal logic he considered "an indispensable tool indeed for clarifying much of our thought, but not, as some are tempted to suppose, the unique and sufficient key to the functioning of language and thought in general". When his erstwhile tutor Paul Grice declared, "If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying," Strawson retorted: "If you can put it in symbols, it's not worth saying."
Strawson's first love was literature. He could recite reams of poetry by heart. He would have liked to be a poet rather than a philosopher, but was only what he dismissively dubbed a competent versifier, writing near-pastiches of Pope. One poem, in the voice of an English spinster, mused on the sign above a bed in a French hotel: "Défense de pousser des cris de joie." (No uttering yells of joy.)
The contrast between the idealised abstraction of formal logic and the richness of ordinary language was further stressed in Strawson's 1952 Introduction to Logical Theory. Quine paid it the compliment of a lengthy if critical review. Strawson criticised Quine's famous dismantling of the analytic/synthetic distinction in his work In Defence of a Dogma (1956), which he co-authored with Paul Grice. Over the years he continued to attack Quine, who nevertheless became a lifelong friend.
He also challenged the philosopher JL Austin, who invited him to reply to his paper on truth at the joint session of the Mind and Aristotelian Society in 1950. Austin's correspondence theory of truth never recovered from Strawson's onslaught, which Strawson pursued in two more articles, in 1964 and 1965.
Strawson's philosophical belligerence was belied by his courtly demeanour, but, like his brother, who was a major-general and military historian, he loved playing war games. With John Carswell, the secretary to the British Academy, he spent hours playing games of high military strategy, according to a complex set of devised rules, with lead soldiers that shot nails from their muskets. Strawson, who never lost a game, was furious if any of his children disturbed his soldiers.
Having approached philosophy without any large general plan of campaign, but with the aim of elucidating particular concepts, Strawson subtitled his work Individuals (1959), "an essay in descriptive metaphysics". He did not aim to replace our overall view of the world, as would a revisionary metaphysician such as Descartes or Leibnitz, he sought to exhibit "general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in terms of which we think about particular things".
Using the thought-experiment of a world composed entirely of sounds, he argued that the most basic particular things could be neither sense experiences, as proposed by traditional empiricism, nor atomic particles, as in science, nor events or processes, since none of these can easily be re-identified or even identified. He claimed that material bodies are primitive in our conceptual scheme, as are persons, to whom both states of consciousness and corporeal characteristics "are equally applicable".
Against the Descartes-inspired notion that a person is "an embodied anima", Strawson argued that we do not begin from our own consciousness and work outwards, but the reverse - "it is a necessary condition of one's ascribing states of consciousness, experiences, to oneself ... that one should also ascribe them, or be prepared to ascribe them, to others who are not oneself".
In The Bounds of Sense (1966), a scholarly exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Strawson used what remained fruitful in Kant to investigate further the "limits to what we can conceive of, or make intelligible to ourselves, as a possible general structure of experience". By using a Kant-type transcendental argument, his classic Freedom and Resentment (1960) contested that it is impossible in practice to believe in determinism, whatever the philosophical arguments for it.
Strawson claimed that human relationships necessarily presuppose that our actions are done out of free will, are seen as revealing kindness, malevolence or indifference, and merit responses such as resentment, forgiveness and gratitude. He conceded that it was possible occasionally to suspend these "normal participant reactive attitudes" for the objective attitude by which we see small children or the psychologically abnormal as exempt from moral responsibility or censure (and, in the worst cases, as objects to be tolerated and controlled).
But the reactive attitudes are "too thorough going and deeply rooted", too essential for inter-personal connectedness, to be suspended wholesale, so that "it is useless to ask whether it would not be rational for us to do what it is not in our nature to (be able to) do".
Freedom and Resentment was based on the lecture Strawson gave on becoming a member of the British Academy in 1960. He was visiting professor at Duke University, North Carolina in 1955, at Princeton in 1972, the College de France in 1985, Woodbridge lecturer at Columbia in 1983, and in 1985 Immanuel Kant lecturer at Munich, where he became an honorary doctor in 1998.
In papers published in various collections over the years, he continued to give short shrift to a new generation of reductive philosophers who claimed that what he called "the scientific-objective standpoint" was paramount. To the theory that mental states are no more than brain states, he responded in Scepticism and Naturalism (1985) that "we have no genuine practical use for the concept of [mind-brain] identity here".
He would have no truck with the voguish idea that talk of feelings, thoughts and mental life is merely an atavistic theory which will be superseded by neuroscience. He sarcastically retorted that what materialists disparagingly term folk psychology is "the province of such simple folk as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust and Henry James".
For all his insistence on "the inescapability of the natural or common human standpoint", Strawson was no populariser or champion of the demotic. He was, joked a colleague, the least primitive of persons.
When someone in the audience of his 1977 lectures in Yugoslavia accused him of a bourgeois outlook, he replied, "But I am bourgeois, an elitist liberal bourgeois." He professed delight in literature, landscape, architecture, the company of clever and beautiful women, and of his family, finding his children "all variously gifted, and all, to my mind, invariably charming".
He is survived by his wife, Grace, whom he renamed Ann, two daughters, and two sons, the elder of whom, Galen, is a philosopher at Reading University.
· Sir Peter Frederick Strawson, philosopher, born November 23 1919; died February 13 2006.
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guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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