The Trouble with Kant

Anthony Quinton's ‘The Trouble with Kant’ (Philosophy, Vol. 72, no. 279, January, 1997, pp. 5–18) claims to expose radical faults in Kant's epistemology which are not pointed out ‘in the many commentators (he) has studied’ (p. 17). The faults are, initially, that Kant is a ‘wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer’ (p. 5), and finally that Kant's account of a priori intuitions and concepts is erroneous (p. 16). Quinton suggests that his objections are new, but the truth is that they, and the supposedly Kantian views against which they are directed, have formed a frequent response in commentators from Hegel to Strawson. The ‘wild and irresponsible arguer’ charge is, after all, a commonplace among the ‘fighting Kant tooth and nail’ commentators, though it remains to be shown that Kant is markedly worse than other philosophers of the same period. And the central claim against which Quinton directs his assault, that we impose a spatio-temporal-categorial framework on the manifold of sensation (pp. 5 and 7), has provoked fierce and extensive hostility. Throughout his article Quinton assumes an interpretation of Kant's claim in which his task is to show how our minds construct a common, objective, reality from a spatio-temporal-categorial synthesis ‘by applying a piece of mental apparatus ... to ... a manifold of sensation’ (p. 5). The familiar objections to a ‘coloured spectacles’ interpretation of Kant's account of space and time, and Strawson's initial rejection of the ‘imaginary subject of transcendental psychology’ (Bounds of Sense (London; Methuen, 1966) p. 32) belong to the same tradition.