¹ I take it that a cognitive faculty is one the proper exercise of which is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge.

² Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar

³ Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁴ Foreword to Locke's Essay, p. xxiii.

⁵ Essay, I.i.2.

⁶ Treatise, p. xv.

⁷ Ibid., p. xvi.

⁸ In his Introduction to Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Alvin I. Goldman defends a conception of epistemology which combines elements of what I am calling ‘universalism’ and ‘humanism’, though Goldman's label for humanist epistemology is ‘psychologistic epistemology’.

⁹ McGinn, Colin presses these questions in The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–4.Google Scholar

¹⁰ McGinn, , The Character of Mind, p. 2.Google Scholar

¹¹ Walsh, W. H., Kant–s Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), p. 89.Google Scholar

¹² For example, McGinn, claims in The Character of Mind, p. 1Google Scholar, that ‘it is frequently a good test of a theory of some mental phenomenon to ask whether the proposed theory would be applicable to all actual and possible creatures exemplifying that phenomenon’.

¹³ Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), section 281.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Cf. Walsh, , Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics, pp. 251–2Google Scholar and Cassam, Q., Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 12–21.Google Scholar

¹⁵ All references in this form are to Smith's, Norman Kemp translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929).Google Scholar

¹⁶ This is the less ‘weighty’ of the two senses of ‘object’ which Strawson, P. F. distinguishes in The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966), pp. 72–3.Google Scholar

¹⁷ This way of putting things is suggested by Allison, Henry in Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), chapters 5 and 6Google Scholar.

¹⁸ A discursive understanding is characterized by Kant as one whose knowledge must be ‘by means of concepts’ (A68/B93). He adds that ‘the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of the’ (ibid.). As W. H. Walsh remarks, it was Kant's consistent doctrine that ‘the categories were by no means peculiar to human nature, but were involved in discursive thinking as such’ (Reason and Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 163–4Google Scholar).

¹⁹ To the extent that Kant's account of the role of the categories is an important element of his ‘transcendental psychology’, its universalist orientation is not brought out by Patricia Kitcher's characterization of transcendental psychology as seeking ‘to determine the necessary and universal elements of human cognition’ (Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), p. 19Google Scholar).

²⁰ Strawson reads Kant in this way in ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, in Entity and Identity and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 237–8Google Scholar. He quotes B145–6 in support of this reading. For a more detailed discussion on Kant's position on this question, see Falkenstein, Lorne, Kant's Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 193–200.Google Scholar

²¹ See Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 10–13.

²² Paul Guyer appears to attribute this version of subjectivism to Kant in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 367Google Scholar.

²³ Broad, C. D., Kant: An Introduction, edited by Lewy, C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 7.Google Scholar

²⁴ This is the moral of Harrison's, Ross important paper on ‘Transcendental Arguments and Idealism’, in Idealism Past and Present, ed. Vesey, G., Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

²⁵ As Falkenstein puts it, Kant's view is that it is a ‘contingent truth that, for us, space is a necessary ground of outer appearances’ (Kant's Intuitionism, 199). The related idea that some necessary or ‘eternal’ truths are only contingently necessary has also been attributed to Descartes. See Curley, Edwin, ‘Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths’, Philosophical Review 93/4 (10 1984), 569–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 10.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 9.

²⁸ Allison, Henry, ‘Transcendental Idealism: A Retrospective’, in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., p. 4.

³⁰ Kant's Transcendental Idealism, pp. 83–4.

³¹ Ibid., p. 19.

³² Ibid., p. 29.

³³ ‘The Disappearing “We”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 (1984), 233.Google Scholar

³⁴ Nagel, Thomas, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 18.Google Scholar

³⁵ This aspect of Kant's position is rightly emphasized by Lear in ‘The Disappearing “We”’, 232.

³⁶ The Bounds of Sense, pp. 77–8.

³⁷ Strawson, , ‘Sensibility, Understanding, and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on Henrich and Guyer’, in Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum’, ed. Förster, E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 71.Google Scholar

³⁸ The Bounds of Sense, p. 81.

³⁹ Strawson, , ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, pp. 239–40.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 240.

⁴¹ Cf. The Bounds of Sense, pp. 82–5

⁴² Strawson, , ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, p. 237.Google Scholar

⁴³ The Bounds of Sense, p. 49.

⁴⁴ Strawson, P.F., Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1974), p. 16.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Craig, Edward, ‘Arithmetic and Fact’, in Exercises in Analysis: Essays by Students of Casimer Lewy, ed. Hacking, I. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 91.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ These remarks are only intended to give a very rough indication of how an effective response to scepticism about reason might go. On their own, they are unlikely to persuade those who question the ability of rational reflection to deliver knowledge of things in themselves.

⁴⁷ This is, of course, not to suggest that the epistemological standing of analytic knowledge is wholly unproblematic.

⁴⁸ One question for someone who argues in this way is whether, as has so far been assumed, analytically necessary conditions are, in the realist's sense, objectively necessary conditions. I will not pursue this difficult issue here