The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a 1966 book by P.F. Strawson, a 20th-century Oxford philosopher. The book is a critical reading of Kant's text (referring to parts of it as proceeding "by a non sequitur of numbing grossness"), with an emphasis on the analytical argument of the transcendental deduction, which Strawson takes to be one of the few lasting contributions Kant made to philosophy. The title is a play on a title Kant himself proposed for the Critique of Pure Reason, with "sense" referring both to the mind and the sense faculties, and hence the bounds can be either those of reason or sensation. The book, along with Jonathan Bennett's Kant's Analytic (Cambridge, 1966), reinvigorated Kant studies.
Famous quotes containing the word bounds:
“What comes over a man, is it soul or mind
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)