Born in 1919, Strawson was a leading proponent of ordinary language
philosophy. He is the author of the early and extremely influential
paper On Referring in which he criticized Russell's theory of definite
descriptions. His most influential book, Individuals, helped to raise
the status of metaphysics as a philosophical enterprise. Themes first
addressed in this book continued to be of concern to him in his later
work, including the possibility of objective knowledge, the
subject-predicate distinction, the ontological status of persons, and
the problem of individuation.
Contributors to the book include: Ruth Garrett Millikan, Susan Haack, E.
M. Adams, Panayot Butchvarov, Richard Behling, John McDowell, Simon
Blackburn, Tadeusz Szubka, David Frederick Haight, Joseph S. Wu, Andrew
G. Black, David Pears, Robert Boyd, Hilary Putnam, Paul F. Snowdon,
Arindam Chakrabarti, Wenceslao J. Gonzalez, Ernest Sosa, Chung-M. Tse,
John R. Searle, P. F. Strawson.