Philosophy 224

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Philosophy 224

• Some Candidates Strawson on Individuals

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Individuals An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

• The selection from Strawson is from the 1959 book
  that established his reputation.
• Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe
  the actual structure of our thought about the
  world (Strawson 1959, 9).
• It is to be contrasted with revisionary
  metaphysics, which is concerned to produce a
  better structure (Strawson 1959, 9).

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Strawsons Philosophical Perspective

• Strawson is an analytic philosopher.
• APs are the inheritors of the empiricist and
  (especially) naturalistic tendencies of the
  modern era.
• Strawson belongs to the linguistic
  analysis/ordinary language wing of analytic
  philosophy.
• A primary method of this approach is to
  interrogate the everyday senses of the
  philosophical concepts or terms at issue.

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Strawsons Metaphysics

• So what did Strawsons interrogations produce?
• Strawson divides existence into particulars and
  universals.
• Some of the particulars are basic, which means
  that they are the experiential and conceptual
  building blocks of experience.
• The table can be analyzed or deconstructed into
  parts, but that is not the way we immediately
  apprehend the table.

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So, what is a person?

• A person is a basic particular to which we
  ascribe consciousness.
• These two modes of predication are coeval,
• a personis a type of entity such that both
  predicates ascribing states of consciousness and
  predicates ascribing corporeal characteristicsare
  equally applicable to a single individual of
  that single type (178c1).

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Why is it primitive?

• Strawson offers his account as part of a
  rejection of other competing accounts, including
  the mind-body dualisms of the modern era.
• From this perspective, person is not logically
  primitive, in as much as it is definable in terms
  of more basic kinds (mind and matter
  consciousness over time etc.).
• Weve seen the problems that come from this
  dualistic account. Strawson has the solution the
  person is logically basic and entities like
  individual consciousness are derivative.
• Cf., 179c1

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So what?

• In addition to resolving many of the issues
  arising in connection to the accounts of the
  person rooted in mind/body dualism, Strawsons
  account of personhood also has some useful
  implications for the philosophy of mind.
• Of particular importance is the distinction
  between M- and P-predicates.

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M- and P-

• M- and P- predicates work in the same way
  (pointing out a specific, properly basic and
  primitive, entity), but P-predicates have an
  importantly different form when ascribed to
  oneself as opposed as being ascribed to others.
• This difference implies that we must also ascribe
  self-ascription to all of the others (181c2).
• This in turn undercuts species of relativism and
  logical behaviorism (attribution is about
  behavior, not mental states).

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What about Life After Death?

• Strawson closes with a consideration of the
  implication of his picture for the belief in an
  immortal soul.
• Such a soul would in effect have P-predicates but
  not m-predicates.
• Its not impossible (you can certainly think
  m-predicates without p-predicates).
• The question is What would it be like to be a
  soul?

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Solipsism, of what?

• P-ascription without M-ascription would condemn
  the entity to solipsism, it must remain for him
  indeed an utterly empty, though not meaningless,
  speculation, as to whether there are any other
  members of his class (186c1).
• At best a former person, in as much as Person
  P-ascription and M-ascription.
• One implication Argument from necessity for
  bodily resurrection.