In the collection of articles by Peter Strawson published in his Analysis and metaphysics the author defines his meta-philosophical position by offering two analogies, relating respectively to philosophy conceived as therapy and to philosophy construed as a grammar of thought. These analogies, if they are viewed in a perspective invoked by reflections on ‘the human condition’ – admittedly, a style of investigation fairly remote form analytic research – open several interesting questions and raise puzzling uncertainties. If we follow some implications of these queries, the general position of Strawson in contemporary philosophy becomes more convincing; it fits quite comfortably in the ‘mainstream philosophy’, and highlights some leading topics in the eternal philosophical agenda.
Weak mysterianism defines the situation in philosophy of mind in which we can neither formulate a solvable problem of consciousness nor prove that it is unsolvable. To develop the issue the author starts with a description of the theories and concepts described as mysterious. General mysterianism is a position in the philosophy of mind, according to which we are admittedly able to indicate scientific issues but cannot formulate them as scientific problems and thus solve them. These issues are called ‘mysteries’ by Noam Chomsky. The article presents several argumentation strategies typical for mysterian theories – evolutionary closure, autonomy of consciousness, and methodological mysterianism of William Seager. Each is subject to criticism, which shows that the mysterian argumentation is non-conclusive. It turns out, therefore, that the problem of mysteriousness is that indicating the possibility of mysteries in science does not entail a proof that we are dealing with specific mysteries (first and foremost the mystery of the mind).
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).
W artykule zestawiam ze sobą i zarazem oceniam dwa zupełnie odmienne sposoby ujmowania rzeczywistości moralnej. Immanuel Kant stworzył nie tylko bardzo wymagającą, ale zarazem zawiłą, sztuczną i nieempiryczną etykę. W dodatku jest ona mocno obciążona metafizycznie, a nawet teologicznie. Natomiast Peter Strawson w artykule z 1962 roku dokonał naturalistycznego i realistycznego opisu rzeczywistości moralnej.