Strawson, Peter Frederick

"Presuppositions underlie all our speech and thought in ways we seldom notice."

"To deny that persons are material beings is to misunderstand the concept of a person."

"Language does not represent reality in the way a mirror reflects an image."

"The logical structure of a sentence often misleads us about the metaphysical structure of reality."

"We are not, in the end, transcendent observers of the world, but participants in it."

"The task of philosophy is not to escape our concepts, but to understand them fully."

"Truth is not correspondence with an independent reality, but something more complex."

"The meaning of a demonstrative depends on what the speaker refers to, not on description."

"Philosophical analysis must respect the dignity of ordinary language."

"We misunderstand freedom when we think of it as absence of constraint."

"The concept of identity cannot be fully explained in purely logical terms."

"Events do not have intrinsic temporal properties; temporality is a feature of how we conceptualize."

"The relationship between language and reality is more intimate than traditional correspondence theory allows."

"To understand a concept is not necessarily to be able to define it precisely."

"Philosophical skepticism often rests on a misconception about what counts as knowledge."

"The first-person perspective is irreducible in our understanding of consciousness."

"We inherit our basic concepts from the natural human attitude, not from logic."

"Substance is not a thing apart from its properties, but a unified basis for properties."

"The subject of experience is not merely a point of view, but a continuing unity."

"Language embodies a kind of implicit wisdom about human nature and the world."

"To be a person is to be capable of reciprocal recognition with other persons."

"The problem of universals arises from trying to separate language from use."

"We should not seek escape from our human conceptual scheme, but rather understand it better."

"Reference to particular individuals is fundamental to language in a way that cannot be reduced to general terms."

"The unity of consciousness is not something we can fully explain, but something we must acknowledge."

"Philosophical confusion often arises from taking the surface grammar of a sentence as a guide to logical form."

"Time and tense are features of how we conceptualize events, not properties of events themselves."

"The criterion for personhood is not consciousness or rationality alone, but a complex cluster of characteristics."

"We understand persons through a holistic grasp of their behavior and intentions, not through reductive analysis."

"The attempt to ground all knowledge in indubitable foundations is fundamentally misguided."