Strawson on Kant

Most of the Critique of Pure Reason is prima facie dead, because prima facie dependent upon wholly indefensible theories. The commentator’s dominant problem is to display the life below the surface: showing where an argument has an innocent analogue yielding the same conclusion, or a weaker but still untrivial one; testing these mutant arguments and conclusions for consonance with the broad lines of Kant’s thought; and so on. There have been many attempts and some piecemeal successes, but what has been needed is mastery of the relevant relationships as they obtain at the levels both of fine detail and of over-all plan. This mastery is now available to us. The dominant problem has been solved, in all essentials, by Strawson.1

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science