Abstract

The central aim of this dissertation is to show how, starting in the second half of the nineteenth-century, Anglo-American philosophers were led to revise Kant's epistemology so as to have it reflect their own interest in epistemic justification; and how twentieth-century Anglo-American epistemologists and commentators have inherited, and taken for granted, this reinterpretation. Kant himself, it is argued, had no interest in the question, "How do we justify our claims to knowledge?". Instead, it is maintained, his inquiry was motivated by the question which preoccupied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology, but which later came to be regarded as merely psychological: "How do we mentally acquire our claims to knowledge?". ;At the same time, then, this dissertation argues that the interest in epistemic justification is the principal source of the antipsychologism which has dominated Anglo-American commentary on Kant's thought. Because this is not the interest that inspires Strawson's antipsychologism, it is argued further that recent criticism of the latter does not face the really influential bias; that, indeed, insofar as this criticism presupposes the idea that Kant was concerned to justify our claims to knowledge, it perpetuates this bias