Strawson on Transcendental Idealism

Abstract

In his book The Bounds of Sense, Strawson argues that a distinction can be made between two strands in Kant's thought in the Critique of Pure Reason. On the one hand, there is what Strawson calls the strand, in which Kant is concerned with the set of ideas which forms the limiting framework of all our thought about the world and experience of the world . On the other, there is the doctrine of idealism. These two strands, Strawson maintains, are not merely distinguishable, they are independent of each other. The analytic strand contains much that is worth preserving; the doctrine of idealism, however, is incoherent and based on a misleading analogy. There is no case for preserving any part of it, and it can be abandoned without any real damage to Kant's analytic achievements. Since Kant himself thought of idealism as his major philosophical insight and as the means of solving most of the main problems in philosophy, it is only natural to ask how far Strawson's low opinion of the doctrine is justified. Is idealism indefensible ? Is it logically independent of Kant's analysis of the structure of experience ? These are the questions I shall attempt to answer in this paper. Much of the paper will inevitably be concerned with the interpretation of what Kant says, in the first Critique and elsewhere. But my aim is not primarily to contribute to Kantian scholarship. It is more to examine a particular philosophical doctrine, which I think has certain merits and which can be considered to a certain extent without reference to the fact that Kant invented it. Only to a certain extent, however; since Kant was its inventor, his statement of its main tenets must be taken as defining what the doctrine is, and it is legitimate to require that any doctrine purporting to be transcendental idealism should be consistent with at least most of what Kant said. On