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

Strawson presents a fairly thorough critical evaluation of Kant's first critique, with the goal of seeing how much of Kant is salvageable and how much must be discarded due. The Bounds of Sense does a good job addressing (and tearing down) many of the most contentious and sketchy aspects of the Critique of Pure Reason, e.g. the mania for systematicity, the problem of the "affective" relationship between things in themselves and appearances, and the self-knowledge. Strawson also provides some good criticism of the analogies of experience, and the antinomies.

Overall, his goal is to show how flimsy the arguments for transcendental idealism are, and yet also how much of Kant can be maintained without this doctrine.

The bounds of the real, we may say, are indeed not co-extensive with the types of sensible experience we in fact enjoy. We must not suppose that the nature of reality is exhausted by the kinds of knowledge which we have of it. To suppose this would be a kind of restrictive dogmatism unjustified in its way as the inflated dogmatism which pretends to a knowledge transcending experience. The latter makes an unjustifiable a priori claim to expand knowledge beyond experience. The former would make an equally unjustifiable a priori claim to restrict reality within the bounds of the kind of experience we in fact have.

12/6/21