Sellars’s Interpretive Variations on Kant’s Transcendental Idealist Themes

Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and nonspatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant. Wilfrid Sellars’ 1966 John Locke Lectures, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1968, ‘SM’) were delivered the same year as the publication of P. F. Strawson’s groundbreaking book, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1966). Both books are philosophically sophisticated and ambitious, both in the interpretation of Kant and in relation to expressing the authors’ own philosophical views. As we shall see, however, Sellars’ book presents some exceptional interpretive challenges for the reader, and I hope to provide some clarifying guidance to the terrain. In this chapter I will examine some of the main contours of Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, focusing on this occasion on its most controversial aspect: his complex engagements with Kant’s transcendental idealist distinction between objects as ‘appearances’ and as ‘things in themselves’. Whereas elsewhere I have primarily been concerned to isolate those aspects of Sellars’ analytic Kantian or (as I call it) ‘Kantian naturalist’ theory of experience that I find most defensible, in what follows I want to explore Sellars’ more full-blooded treatments of Kant’s transcendental idealism in particular, both for its own sake and as an interpretation of Kant. In The Bounds of Sense Strawson distinguished centrally between ‘two faces of the Critique’ (1966, cf. Part One). One face for Strawson is represented by Kant’s deeply insightful ‘Metaphysics of Experience,’ which turned out, not surprisingly, to bear strong affinities to the ‘descriptive