The Bounds of Sense

"You’re quite right to point out that I was fortunate enough to be taught by Strawson as a graduate student. It was a wonderful and exhilarating experience. This is the one book on my list that isn’t by Kant himself, but any English speaker who studies the work of Kant will recognise the importance of this book, and, I think, will agree with me, even if it wouldn’t make it into their list of five, that it is not totally out of place there either. One of the reasons why I’ve included it is that it has quite a historical significance. This is a book that was written in the 1960s by an Oxford philosopher at a time when Oxford philosophy in particular, and British philosophy more generally, and Anglo-American philosophy more generally still, were pretty much hostile to the sort of philosophy that dealt with the abstruse metaphysical questions that Kant deals with in the Critique of Pure Reason . Earlier in the century, in the 1920s and 1930s, there had been a movement known as Logical Positivism which dismissed a lot of this stuff as just meaningless gibberish. Later, Oxford philosophy was dominated by what came to be known as Ordinary Language Philosophy, whose adherents thought that the way to address philosophical questions was just to think in terms of what someone in the street would say about various different issues. All of this was very much antithetical to the kind of thing you find in the pages of the Critique of Pure Reason . “The question for any exegete of Kant, or Strawson, for that matter, is the extent to which Strawson can have his Kantian cake and eat it” What Strawson is trying to do in his book The Bounds of Sense is explore the Critique of Pure Reason . He takes this classic philosophical text and goes through it, explaining the nature of Kant’s project, defending it where he thinks it can be defended, criticising it where he thinks it can be criticised. But, above all, he wants to show its importance—its historical importance and its philosophical importance. And this was itself of historical and philosophical importance because, in a way, it was part of Strawson’s project to rehabilitate metaphysics. He went on to do very important metaphysical work of his own, almost always with a kind of Kantian inspiration. In this book, he’s explicitly articulating the Kantian inspiration for a lot of what you find elsewhere in his work. Absolutely. He’s not afraid to criticise Kant where he thinks Kant can be criticised and, in fact, one of the most distinctive things about the book is that he wants to take issue with the thing that we kept describing as absolutely fundamental. Again and again, in this interview, I’ve come back to this distinction between appearance and reality and I’ve tried to emphasise how important it is for Kant. I’ve used the analogy of spectacles and emphasised that even that fact that we see things in spatio-temporal terms is part of these metaphorical spectacles. And, actually, the fact of the matter is that Strawson is deeply uncomfortable with that. He thinks that it’s a picture of the world that is ultimately just unintelligible. Indeed, it’s not just that it can be undermined by considerations that might be wheeled in from elsewhere. Strawson is even inclined to think that it undermines itself, that the very setting up of this picture involves transgressing the limits that Kant is so keen to draw. You can’t even think of yourself as wearing a pair of spectacles unless you’re able to take them off and look at them and investigate them as a pair of spectacles; but the whole point is that that’s precisely what we’re not supposed to be able to do. “To have written about those topics with the depth of insight that he did is truly extraordinary” So, Strawson sees the Critique as undermining itself in some fundamental ways. There’s something right at the heart of Kant’s project that Strawson wants to distance himself from. Nevertheless, in the course of defending this picture in the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant does all sorts of things, tackles all sorts of questions, and makes all sorts of philosophical moves. Strawson’s feeling is that there’s a lot there in the Critique of Pure Reason that can still be salvaged. The sheer fact that we’re trying to jettison this picture of a pair of spectacles doesn’t mean that we have to jettison all the arguments that Kant himself takes to support that picture. One of the things that you find Strawson doing in The Bounds of Sense is salvaging as much as he thinks can be salvaged, defending as much as he thinks can be defended, without this background metaphysical picture. The question for any exegete of Kant, or Strawson, for that matter, is the extent to which Strawson can have his Kantian cake and eat it. Inevitably, as with anything else in philosophy, there are divided views about that, and some people think that what Kant presents us with is much more of a unified package than Strawson takes it to be and that if he really does want to defend Kant on certain points then, whether he likes it or not, he’s going to have to defend Kant on other points as well that he’s keen to reject. One obvious answer to that question is the sheer combined breadth and depth of his work. If you think about just the range of issues that Kant dealt with – and we’ve seen something of that range in this interview – it’s staggering that one person could have written about so many topics. But to have written about those topics with the depth of insight that he did is truly extraordinary. So, that’s already the beginnings of an answer to the question. But I think even that is only the beginnings of the answer because the other really striking thing about Kant is that, despite the range, you’ve also got something that at first blush you might think would be incompatible with such a range, namely an incredible unity of concern. There are certain basic ideas that he keeps coming back to, including things that we’ve kept coming back to in this discussion. Again and again, we’ve come back to this fundamental distinction between appearance and reality and we’ve talked about Kant’s constant concern with the exercise of reason and what we can and can’t do through a proper exercise of reason. And this idea that we’re fundamentally rational beings yet also limited in various ways, which itself shows up in this distinction between appearance and reality: that’s an idea that dominates the whole of his work. So, on the one hand, you’ve got this philosopher exploring issue after issue after issue that, on the face of it, might look like quite disparate issues; and, on the other hand, you’ve got this philosopher with a very profound preoccupation with certain questions that recur throughout all of these discussions. That combination of breadth, depth, and unity is a combination that you find in all the great philosophers – it’s not unique to Kant, but in my view it’s more marked in Kant than in any other philosopher."