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

BOOK REVIEWS 335 any kind of aesthetics which applies to works of literature standards of reasonableness. Particularly meritorious is Alexander's attempt to explain Hamann's criticism of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But it is somewhat marred by his misinterpretation of Hume. Alexander presents him as if he had based his criticism of the concept of causality on the fallibility of sense impressions (pp. l13f.), which is entirely erroneous. And it is misleading to say that the category of causality is according to Kant pure intuition (p. 114). In his conclusion Alexander sums up Hamann's main objections to the Enlightenment , but he also characterizes him to be, in some respects, a man of the Enlightenment. This latter, somewhat surprising assertion Alexander substantiates: Hamann rejects authority and drops "the legal framework as the framework of theology" (p. 198). Since the authority to which the Enlightenment objected was the authority of the tyrant and the priest, since Alexander quotes no specific passage proving that Hamann also rejected these two authorities, since Hamann hardly ever deals ex professo with "the legal framework" of Christian theology, and since the Enlightenment is hardly interested in this specific problem, I find it difficult to follow Alexander. "Hamann's writings are still obscure," says Alexander (p. 199) and on this modest note closes his book. For clearing up some of Hamann's obscurities Alexander deserves gratitude from all Hamann scholars. PHmIP MEVa.~N Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. By P. F. Strawson. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966. Pp. 296. $6.25) No book on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is without its difficulties. On the one hand there is the tendency toward slavish exegesis, usually of the sort that avoids basic philosophical problems by submerging them in the very Kantian language which gave rise to them in the first place. On the other hand, as one's own philosophical commitments come to the fore, there is an almost irresistible compulsion to merge what Kant actually said with what he was "struggling" to say, "really" meant, or should have said. P. F. Strawson's book has its difficulties too, but not the ones I have mentioned. He avoids the pitfalls of Kantian terminology while remaining faithful on the whole to the philosophical problems this terminology was designed both to clarify and to solve. Though he has a great deal to say about Kant's actual views, what Kant seemed to have in mind, what is salvagable in Kant's views, and what a philosopher might truly say concerning the problems with which Kant struggled, Strawson is scrupulous in his identification of which particular enterprise he is engaged in at any particular point in his book. What results is a study at once both faithful to Kant and relevant to contemporary philosophical problems. The source of the major difficulties in Strawson's study is at the same time the source of its major virtues. Strawson carefully distinguishes two enterprises engaged in by Kant: (1) the articulation of a minimal conceptual framework in terms of which any experience can be said to be intelligible and without reference to which no experience can be meaningfully conceived, and (2) the forging of a philosophy of mind, a "transcendental" psychology of human cognitive mechanisms (faculties), on the basis of which human experience becomes explicable. The former Strawson construes as a metaphysics of experience, descriptive in the sense in which Strawson uses 336 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY this term in his Individuals. The latter Strawson refers to as the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. Strawson holds that Kant appeals to doctrines propounded in (2) as a means of justifying the doctrines he articulates in (1), but that the doctrines appealed to in (2) are neither necessary for this justification nor for that matter even in themselves intelligible---given Kant's own criteria of intelligibility implicit in his transcendental philosophy. In The Bounds of Sense Strawson argues these theses carefully and plausibly, particularly with regard to the serf or "subject" of experience. That Kant's transcendental psychology--his appeal to faculties of sensibility, imagination and understanding, syntheses of...