Strawson’s Metacritique

Abstract

Abstract What is the status of the claims which make up Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason? This question seemed to Kant’s contemporaries to require a metacritique. Strawson’s criticisms of Kant should be understood in this context: as raising a metacritical challenge about Kant’s grounds for the claims which make up his arguments. What about the claims which make up Strawson’s own arguments in The Bounds of Sense? This chapter argues, against what it takes to be the general consensus, that Strawson did not and should not have understood these claims to be analytic. Rather he is somewhat puzzlingly committed to our possessing non-analytic but still a priori knowledge of his claims. What could such knowledge consist in? The chapter extracts from G.E. Moore’s early writings on Kant a model for understanding such knowledge, one which enables us to better appreciate the way in which Strawson’s methodology dovetails with Kant’s own.