First published in 1974, "Freedom and Resentment" and Other Essays is a collection of essays by British philosopher Sir Peter Frederick Strawson, commonly known as P.F. Strawson. Strawson "was a leading member of the ordinary language school of analytic philosophy during the 1950s and ’60s" and, at the time of the collection's publication, was working as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the Magdalen College of the University of Oxford, a position which he held from 1968 until his retirement in 1987.
Strawson was strongly critical of the ideas purported by prominent philosophers such as Bertrand Russell (specifically Russell's theory of descriptions) and Immanuel Kant (specifically Kant's notions of transcendental idealism). Strawson's essays attempted to reconcile the predominantly empirical field of ordinary language analysis with the field of metaphysics, which ordinary language analysts and other Oxford philosophers (see: A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin) "tended to view . . . with skepticism if not outright scorn."
While several of the essays included "Freedom and Resentment" and Other Essays do focus on aspects of ordinary language analysis such as syntax and other linguistic structures, other essays focus on the metaphysical side of Strawson's work. The titular essay, for example, deals primarily with the philosophical theory of determinism--which posits that "all events, including moral choices, are determined completely by previously existing causes" --as well as with conceptualization of resentment as a reactive attitude held towards a certain agent when that agent hurts our feelings.
Prior to the publication of "Freedom and Resentment" and Other Essays, Strawson was made a Fellow of the British Academy (1960) and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971), and he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1969 to 1970. Three years after the collection's publication, he was knighted. Strawson passed away in 2006, but continues to be regarded as a great contributor to the 20th century "golden age" of philosophy at Oxford, as well as as one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers in general.
