According to Strawson, the book originated in lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason he began giving in 1959 at the University of Oxford.

[4][5] The Bounds of Sense has been praised by philosophers such as John McDowell,[6] Charles Parsons,[7] Roger Scruton,[8] and Howard Caygill.

She credited Strawson with encouraging analytic philosophy to engage with past philosophers and with creating "enormous interest in the anti-sceptical possibility of transcendental arguments" as well as in "the nature of experience of objectivity and the unity of consciousness".

While she noted that Strawson's interpretation of the Deduction is controversial, she believed that he correctly identified the questions Kant was trying to answer.

"[10] In 2016, The Bounds of Sense was discussed in the European Journal of Philosophy by Allais,[13] Henry Allison,[14] Quassim Cassam,[15] and Anil Gomes.