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Strawson first gained philosophical fame at the age of 29 in 1950, when he criticised Bertrand Russell's renowned Theory of Descriptions for failing to do justice to the richness of ordinary language. Strawson, an intellectual prize-fighter, soon took on the Oxford ordinary language philosopher, J. L. Austin, and the American giant of logic, Willard van Orman Quine.
Strawson, even more than Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, insisted on the richness and ineluctability of ordinary language and natural beliefs. In Individuals and The Bounds of Sense , he sought to give a rational account of beliefs "stubbornly held … at a primitive level of reflection"; these, even if rejected, or apparently rejected, by philosophers "at a more sophisticated level of reflection", are what we are all "naturally and inescapably committed to. (en) |
