Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

A book that helped restore metaphysics to respectability in post-war analytic philosophy. Strawson distinguishes revisionary metaphysics, which tries to produce a better structure of thought than the one we have, from descriptive metaphysics, which aims only to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world. Part One, on particulars, argues that material bodies are basic: we can identify and reidentify other particulars, such as events or private experiences, only by relating them to bodies in a single spatio-temporal framework. A chapter on sounds asks whether a purely auditory world could support the idea of objects existing unperceived. The chapter on persons argues that the concept of a person is primitive, one to which both physical and psychological predicates apply, which Strawson uses against both Cartesian dualism and the no-ownership view of experience. A chapter criticises Leibniz's monads. Part Two, on logical subjects, explains why particulars appear in thought and talk only as subjects, never as predicates.

It shows how careful analysis of ordinary thought can do real metaphysics, and its chapter on persons remains central to discussions of mind and self.