Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. The first part of the book sets out the place of bodies and persons in our thought. Strawson poses some fundamental questions, such as why we ascribe states of consciousness to anything, and why we ascribe them to the same thing to which we ascribe physical predicates.The second part of the book establishes the connection between bodies and persons and the idea of an object of reference. Strawson argues that the crucial link between these two notions, and with it, the explanation of the status of the particular as the paradigm logical subject, is found in the idea of 'completeness'.
Throughout, Individuals advances some highly influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'.
