Strawson, Peter Frederick (1919–) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Strawson, Peter Frederick(1919–)

Peter Frederick Strawson, the British philosopher, was educated at Christ's College, Finchley, and St. John's College, Oxford. He holds the BA and MA degrees and is a fellow of University College, Oxford.

Language and Logic

Strawson is a leading member of the circle of philosophers whose work is sometimes described as "ordinary language philosophy" or as "Oxford philosophy." Of his early work, the most influential and most controversial is the famous article "On Referring" (Mind, 1950), a criticism of the philosophical aspects of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions. According to Russell's theory any sentence of the form "The f is g"—for example, "The king of France is bald"—is properly analyzed as follows (in terms of our example): "There is a king of France. There is not more than one king of France. There is nothing which is king of France and which is not bald."

Strawson argues that this analysis confuses referring to an entity with asserting the existence of that entity. In referring to an entity, a speaker presupposes that the entity exists, but he does not assert that it exists, nor does what he asserts entail that it exists. Presupposition is to be distinguished from entailment.

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