One World

My starting point in this essay is a brief but fascinating section in The Bounds of Sense,1 in which Strawson discusses a likewise brief but fascinating passage in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.2 I am referring respectively to Part Two, Chapter III, §8 (which incidentally contains Strawson's sole reference to Wittgenstein in his entire bookwe shall see the significance of this reference in due course) and A216/B263. In the latter Kant writes that all appearances lie in one nature, and must lie therein, (ibid.). In the former Strawson asks why we should accept any such conclusion. Why, to appropriate the title of that section, only one objective world? It is important to be clear what Strawson, following Kant, is asking. Consider the four-dimensional realm that we inhabit. Call this the Cosmos. Then Strawson's question, in effect, is why we should agree that the Cosmos constitutes the whole of empirical reality. The word empirical is important here. It connects with Kant's explicit reference to appearances.3 Kant himself allows for the possibility that the Cosmos does not exhaust reality in a broader sense of reality (a point to which we shall return). But the Cosmos does, Kant insists, exhaust empirical reality. And Strawson asks why we should agree. (Author abstract)