Strawson and Analytic Kantianism

Abstract It is a commonplace that the reputation of, and interest in, philosophers of the past waxes and wanes from decade to decade. But while even the greatest members of the philosophical pantheon can become unfashionable, some of them have never been neglected entirely. Plato and Aristotle belong to that select group, and so do the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, and its most eminent representative, Kant. Still, there was a time when interest in Kant was mainly historical in nature, roughly between the 1920s and the 1960s. After the First World War the neo-Kantianism that had dominated academic philosophy on the Continent for fifty years finally ran out of steam. As a dynamic motor of philosophical development neo Kantianism was replaced by phenomenology and its hermeneutic offspring on the one hand, by analytic philosophy on the other.