Abstract
Kant’s transcendental philosophy was to be an exhaustive investigation of the necessary conditions of the possibility of thought and experience in general. And it was to proceed aprioricompletely independently of observation and empirical theory. Reason alone was to discover its own scope and limits; the conditions of its possible employment were to be “deduced” from thought and experience as they actually are. Any such enterprise could be expected to — and in that master’s hands obviously did — yield lasting illumination of the enormous richness of interconnections among our various ways of thinking of ourselves and the world. Kant showed how and why in order to think certain kinds of thoughts, or to possess a certain kind of mental capacity, we must possess and exercise certain others, and then still others in turn. Human thought was thereby revealed as incredibly more complicated and much more of a piece than any atomistic picture of discrete impressions and ideas coming and going in the mind could possibly convey.
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Notes
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London, 1953, Bxiii.
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, Methuen, London, 1966, pp. 170ff, 39, 235, 51.
The Bounds of Sense, p. 22.
The Bounds of Sense, p. 44.
P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Methuen, London, 1959.See Individuals, e.g., pp. 38–40, 53–54.
The Bounds of Sense, p. 44.
The Bounds of Sense, pp. 16–18 and elsewhere.
This was the challenge of my “Transcendental Arguments”, The Journal of Philosophy, 1968.
See P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Methuen, London, 1985, ch. I.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 19.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 20.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 13.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 19.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 22.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 21.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 22.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 21.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 25.
Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 21.
The limits on the error or falsity which we can find in the beliefs of others are central to Donald Davidson’s conception of the project of “radical interpretation” and its consequences. See his “Radical Interpretation” and “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in his Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984. The anti-sceptical consequences of the project are drawn out more explicitly in his “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” in E. Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, and “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Critique of Pure Reason, B4.
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (tr. G. E. M. Anscombe), Blackwell, Oxford, 1953, §261.
I am grateful to those many members of the conference whose helpful comments led to improvements in the version of this paper originally presented there and to Anthony Brueckner for his comments on a later but still intermediate version.
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Stroud, B. (1994). Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability. In: Parrini, P. (eds) Kant and Contemporary Epistemology. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0834-8_13
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