Peter Frederick Strawson. British philosopher and logician. Professor at Oxford since 1968 , he is one of the main representatives of the philosophy of ordinary language.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Studies
- 2 Works
- 3 Death
- 2 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He was born on November 23 , 1919 in London . The son of the headmaster of a school located north of his native London, Peter cultivated from a young age a great respect for study, especially for literature, which upon finishing high school would lead him to obtain a scholarship for a career in English at the Saint John? S College, University of Oxford.
Studies
He studied at Christ College of the University of Oxford where he returned to teach and in 1968 was appointed Emeritus Professor of Metaphysics. In the 1940s, Strawson actively participated in World War II, in the service of the British Naval Artillery under the command of a radar station. From 1942 , with the rank of captain, he joined the Electromechanical Engineers Battalion, where he even remained until a year after the end of the war. During that period, perhaps the most atypical of his life, he married Grace Hall Martin, with whom he would have four children. One of them, Galen, followed in her father’s footsteps and is now a distinguished philosopher.
At the end of his military experience, Strawson returned to Oxford as a member of the board of the prestigious university college in that city. There he continued to work on the theory of language, a field in which he soon achieved enormous fame for challenging Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, highly respected at the time.
Plays
In his first book, Introduction to the Theory of Logic (1952), his analysis of the relationship between formal logic and the logical characteristics of common language appears. He argues that the complexity of common language is insufficiently represented by formal logic and that different instruments must be used in common language analysis. In Individuals (1959), he deals with what he called descriptive metaphysics, an effort to describe how human beings think about the world. It concludes that the categories “material body” and “person” occupy a main position in the conceptual structuring of the world.
Death
Peter Frederick Strawson passed away in the UK on February 13 , 2006 , at the age of 86. The significance of his work earned him several awards and distinctions, including the Order of the British Empire that he received in 1977.
