Customer Reviews

Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

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I'm baffled by a previous reviewer's claim that Strawson's book "offers the typical idealist interpretation of Kant." The principal achievement of Strawson's excellent book is to break AWAY from the traditional idealist interpretation of Kant.

This is an extremely important classic text on Kant. Strawson has a metaphysical project that is at once inspired by Kantian issues (and insights) and independent of them, which is more elaborately developed in his Individuals. Here, Strawson offers us an eloquent exposition and critical discussion of the CPR. He is not altogether sympathetic with K's TI. However, most Kant scholars agree that Bounds of Sense is not a defense of Kant's metaphysics--Strawson's Kant is not a Kant that a student should walk away with as the genuine article. Nevertheless, Strawson provides us with elegant philosophical prose, while highlighting both areas: marks of Kant's genius and piteous incoherence (or obscurity).

Despite the fact that Strawson's attribution of inconsistency to K's TI isn't well argued or defensible, there is still much to learn here about good analytic philosophy (although not in terms of historical accuracy).

I also recommend: Guyer, Longuenesse, Allison, Langton, Stroud, Forster, McDowell's M and W, and A. Brueckner's UCLA dissertation on Kantian anti-skeptical strategies, as well as H. Ginsborg's Harvard dissertation on judgment. Also see Stern on Transcendental Arguments (Oxford UP).

Part One in Bounds of Sense is the General Review, which is important reading, especially the conclusion with its most elegant (and longish) last paragraph. This provides us with compelling reasons to take Kant seriously in our contemporary philosophical climate, despite Strawson's charge of the Second Analogy as a non sequitur of numbing grossness (a famous quote, p 28). Strawson is correct to hail the insights of the Trans. Deduction, which he says "are very great and novel gains in epistemology, so great and so novel that, nearly two hundred years after they were made, they have still not been fully absorbed into the philosophical consciousness" (p. 28). Outside of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Berkeley, Strawson is likely right in this characterization.

Part Two, Section 2 is useful reading. Strawson's work in Section 3.2, 3.3, and 3.8 is also useful (on permanence, objectivity, and the refutation of idealism). Part Four is important yet controversial (on K's TI). Part Five is also most valuable; it is on K's geometry.

Although this is a problematic and controversial text (and overall interpretation of Kant), for all that, it is also valuable and often insightful. I recommend this text in conjunction with reading Strawson's Individuals and K's Prolegomena (Cambridge or Hackett).

Strawson's work reigned as the supreme example of Kant scholarship in English for several decades. It might have been ok for its time, but it offers the typical idealist interpretation of Kant, and attempts to separate the contents of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic from his Transcendental Analytic, arguing that only the contents of the latter have merit. But the two sections play the similar roles in Kant's revolution and to wholly reject the aesthetic and not the analytic is, I believe, impossible. Strawson does not even take seriously the arguments of Kant's aesthetic, probably because he is English and the English always get nervous around the aesthetic. While one may still have to deal with this book if writing a paper on Kant, as Strawson is still held in fairly high regard, I would recommend this book only for one who is not familiar with the traditional idealist interpretations of Kant.