Cartesian challenge of the metaphysical understanding of the human being as a person in light of P.F. Strawson’s Individuals

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).