P. F. Strawson and the ‘Pseudo-Material Shadows’

Abstract

Abstract In section IV of ‘On Referring’ (1950), P.F. Strawson warns us of the ‘long philosophical shadows’ cast by the subject-predicate distinction. ‘The distinctions between particular and universal, between substance and quality’, he says, ‘are such pseudo-material shadows, cast by the grammar of the conventional sentence in which separable expressions play distinguishable roles’. Although Strawson later offered some qualifications on this claim, this chapter shows how, in his book Individuals (1959), he adheres to its basic spirit. There he holds that just as the fundamental form of thought is not the subject-predicate form, so too the fundamental form of reality is not the particular-universal form.