Strawson and Kant

Sir Peter Strawson is not just among the greatest living philosophers, but also the leading proponent of analytic Kantianism. His seminal Individuals rehabilitated metaphysics as a respectable enterprise within analytic philosophy. It also inaugurated a distinctly Kantian project - descriptive metaphysics - and placed the idea of transcendental arguments at the centre of epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological debate. This was followed by The Bounds of Sense, a brilliant and provocative discussion of the First Critique which continues to influence Kant scholarship by way of inspiration and opposition alike.

While there have been anthologies on Strawson and on transcendental arguments, this is the first book to cover Strawson's relation to Kant as a whole. It combines Strawson's own account of that relation with papers by eminent pupils, admirers and critics. Among the contributors are leading Kant scholars, metaphysicians and historians of analytic philosophy. The papers divide into three kinds. Some of them (Strawson, Glock, Hacker, Bird, Cassam, Stroud) deal with general questions concerning the nature of Strawson's Kantianism and of his rehabilitation of metaphysics. Some (Westphal, Rosefeldt, de Gaynesford, Allison, Foerster) are devoted to more specific topics in Kant. In others, (Grundmann and Misselhorn, Stern, Hyman), the focus is more on Strawson than on Kant.

The collection ranges from Kant interpretation and the history of analytic philosophy through philosophical logic, metaphysics, and epistemology to the philosophy of mind and aesthetics. In this, it reflects the range of Strawson's own philosophical interests and achievements. The questions discussed are of central importance not just to Kant scholarship but also to contemporary analytic philosophy. They include the question of whether philosophy can achieve a priori insights and whether these insights concern reality or our way of thinking about reality, the nature of the self, the character of aesthetic appreciation and of perception, and the prospects for meeting the challenge of scepticism.