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 sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. But rather than setting out to replace our overall view of the world, in the manner of the great philosophers of the past, he sought to reveal the general features of the way in which we think about particular things. Individuals presents 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, he advances some highly influential and contentious ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the theory of a person a 'primitive concept'.