Kant's Theory of Knowledge (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 259 reissue of the 1939 Garnier edition, with reproductions of eighteenthcentury engravings on themes of Rousseau. They add rich period flavor to this strange work in which a hypermodern intelligence talks the language of three centuries ago. There are useful notes, the detailed subject index is exceptionally well laid out, the spacious bibliography is ample for Rousseau 's sources and influence, but its meager twentieth-century section should have been reworked and brought up to date. The Introduction, too, can still be read with much profit, even though its critical standpoint is now antiquated, eloquent proof of the effectiveness of Rousseau scholarship in the last two decades. For its price this is a very handy, serviceable edition to have until the Biblioth~que de la PMiade catches up with Garnier Fr~res. Emory University GREGOR SEBBA Kant's Theory o[ Knowledge. By Graham Bird. (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962. Pp. x + 210. ~5.50.) In the Preface the author states that he has two main objectives in his book: To pursue one central argument through the Critique of Pure Reason and to discuss Kant's views in terms of a modern philosophical idiom. Bird follows this programme out through most of the book, departing from it on only one occasion, in Chapter 11 (pp. 181-188) in which he discusses and criticizes Strawson's theory of personality (as presented in his book Individuals , chap. 3). The space given to Strawson does not, however, constitute a serious digression from the main argument because it comes at the end of a chapter devoted to Kant's notion of personality, and so fits quite naturally into the discussion which has preceded it. Bird devotes most of his book to the first task he has set for himself, that of pursuing a single major argument through the Critique. Oddly enough, although he does on several occasions offer brief indications of what this argument is, he nowhere states it fully and explicitly. Thus the reader would be left at a loss to know just what Bird's main concern with Kant's epistemology is, were it not for the appearance on the inside front cover of the dust jacket of a succinct statement of the argument in question, which is identified as "the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories." The text of the book itself is certainly consistent with this statement of the argument for in it Bird makes clear that he considers Kant to be concerned in the Critique mainly with a cluster of closely related epistemological problems. Each chapter of the book is devoted to one or more of these problems and throughout Bird reveals not only his mastery 260 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of Kant scholarship but great skill and ability in philosophical analysis as well. The author begins his book on a negative note, with a criticism o[ other recent interpretations of Kant's theory of knowledge, particularly that of Prichard (as given in his book Kant's Theory of Knowledge). In the first chapter Bird attributes to Prichard what he terms a "crude phenomenalist" interpretation of Kant, or the view that Kant attempted to construct the world of physical objects out of appearances or sensations. Although he admits that in certain passages of the Critique Kant tempts the commentator into viewing him as a phenomenalist, Bird contends that such an interpretation rests on a misunderstanding of Kant's aim and argument. Basically, it is an oversimplification of the Kantian epistemology, resulting mainly from a failure to read the text with sufficient perceptiveness plus a concentration on certain passages at the expense of others. Bird continues his attack on Prichard in the second chapter, arguing that he supplements his "phenomenalist " rendition of the Kantian theory of perception with an equally untenable "noumenalist" view, which maintains that Kant believed: (1) that noumena are the causes of appearances in our sensibility; (2) that what is immediately presented to our senses are appearances, and (3) that knowledge of noumena can be achieved by exploiting the inference from a given sensible effect (appearance) to its presumed objective cause (noumenon). Bird claims that Kant rejected any such "noumenalist" theory...