Peter Strawson

Peter Strawson was the Oxford philosopher who defined "descriptive metaphysics" — the project of articulating the basic conceptual scheme in terms of which human beings necessarily think about the world. His 1959 work Individuals argued that material bodies and persons are the fundamental particulars of our conceptual framework, and mounted a powerful defence of common sense against Cartesian scepticism and revisionary metaphysics.

His 1950 paper "On Referring" was a direct attack on Russell's theory of descriptions and helped establish ordinary language philosophy as a serious alternative to formal approaches. His Freedom and Resentment argued that questions about free will and moral responsibility are best understood through our reactive attitudes — feelings of gratitude, resentment, and indignation — rather than through abstract metaphysical analysis. His interpretation of Kant in The Bounds of Sense became one of the standard readings of the first Critique.