The article discusses two questions of Peter F. Strawson’s understanding of the human being as person. The first question scrutinizes Strawson’s philosophical choice between the tradition of Aristotle’s metaphysics and Kant’s ontology. The second question is the Cartesian challenge as presented in Strawson’s postulate of the primacy of the concept of human person. My understanding of the metaphysics proposed in the Individuals and Strawson’s other works underscores a particular affinity between his anthropological postulate and philosophia perennis. However, the Oxford philosopher is related not only to Aristotelian logic and hermeneutic but also to Kant’s conceptual scheme. In the case of the definition that identifies human being as a person we see the unambiguous reliance by Strawson on the thought of Aristotle. The explicit evidence of this reliance is his reference to the corporeality and space-time character of the human beings, manifested by the recognition of ontological priority of particulars before the reality of mental states of affairs. The effect of this analysis is my observation that Strawson has undertaken to close the gap between mental and material reality that was established in Descartes’ ontological difference between res cogitans and res extensa. The aporia of the lack of communication between human consciousness and human corporeality finds its solution in Strawson’s Individuals in concept of relationship between mind and body intended as a transgression over the Cartesian concept. Strawson proposes a recognition of their simultaneous validity, but he does not propose a new ontological position comparable to H.E. Hengstenberg’s, founded on the idea of the constitution of the human person not in two preclusive elements, as the Cartesian mind and body, but in three elements, namely spirit (Geist), corporeality (Leib) and existential principle (Existenzprinzip).

Russell puts much weight on the concept of relation. In his view relations are real entities that are indispensable in the enterprise of defining mathematical objects, particularly numbers. In the paper I try to extend Russell’s idea beyond the domain of abstract entities. I make an attempt to show that the basic criterion of identity for concrete objects – the criterion of space‑time continuity – can be supplemented, whenever it appears inadequate, by taking into account some relations apart from those that are spatiotemporal. On this occasion I argue for the metaphysical impossibility of time travel and offer some resolutions of the classical paradoxes of identity: amoebas’ reproduction by fission or Theseus’ boat. With respect to relations I argue, against the radical separation of the self from its attributes, that there are essential attributes of the self that constitute its relatively stable individual essence.

From a historical point of view, Peter F. Strawson’s philosophical studies are an important element within contemporary interdisciplinary investigations of the mind-body problem. The aim of this article is to present and analyze Strawson’s program of descriptive metaphysics, along with the associated conception of persons, that he has proposed. In the second part, I also present his non-reductive naturalism, focusing on two of his analyses that belong to the field of mind-body relations: these concern the problem of other minds, and the question of the nomological reduction of mental states of persons to physical ones (i.e. mind-body identity theory). I then point to several possibilities of using Strawson’s conception of persons in the context of issues raised by other questions linked to the mind-body problem (namely, personal identity as it relates to split-brain persons, and the different phases of a person’s development).