Philosophical Review

Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars by Wilfrid Sellars; Pedro Amaral;Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics: Sellars' Cassirer Lecture Notes and Other Essays byWilfrid Sellars; Jeffrey F. SichaReview by: Paul GuyerThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 114, No. 4 (Oct., 2005), pp. 535-539Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30043694 .

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The Philosophical Review, Vol. 114, No. 4 (October 2005)

Wilfrid Sellars, Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars. Edited

by Pedro Amaral. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 2002. Pp. xv, 293.

Wilfrid Sellars, Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics: Sellars' Cassirer Lecture Notes and Other Essays. Edited and introduced by Jeffrey F. Sicha. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 2002. Pp. xviii, 492.

There are two volumes but four books under review here. Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes is one volume that contains two separate groups of material: first, a record of Sellars's contributions to a seminar on Kant that he gave in 1976, when Pedro Amaral, who apparently recorded as well as transcribed this mate-

rial, was a graduate student at Pittsburgh; and second, lectures on Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz that Sellars gave in 1975, apparently preserved in the same way, as well as a paper on "Aristotelian Philosophies of Mind" that Sellars published much earlier, in 1949, in a volume edited by his father Roy Wood Sellars, among others. Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics is one volume that contains two sorts of material: a collection of eleven papers, most but not all directly connected to Kant, nine of which were originally published between 1967 and 1978, and notes for three lectures in a series in memory of Ernst Cas- sirer that Sellars gave at Yale in April, 1979; and a 260-page monograph byJef- frey F. Sicha offering his own reconstruction of Sellars's reconstruction of

Kant, in lieu of the more compact introduction that one would expect to find in a posthumous volume of papers by a notable philosopher whose place in recent history is well established. Among the better-known papers in this vol- ume are "Some Remarks on Kant's Theory of Experience" (1967); "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks," Sellars's Eastern Division Presidential Address for 1970; "Kant's Transcendental Idealism," from the Ottowa Kant conference of 1975; and "The Role of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Expe- rience" (1978).

These two volumes are clearly labors of love by people who greatly admired and were strongly influenced by Sellars. Do they do him a service? In my opin- ion, Sicha's monograph does not serve Sellars nearly as well as a brief introduc- tion laying out Sellars's use of Kant in Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1968) and then explaining precisely what the collected essays add to that would have done. Sicha's work tries to both interpret and improve upon Sellars in prose that is even more laden with machinery than Sellars's

own, and is rambling and repetitive, quoting at length not only from Sellars but even on several occasions from itself. It is hard to picture anyone other than a Sellars fanatic-or a reviewer-wading all the way through this material. Nor does publication of Sellars's notes for the Cassirer lectures, which was appar- ently Sicha's original inspiration for assembling the volume (ix-xi), serve Sell-

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BOOK REVIEWS

ars particularly well: although Sellars apparently started them with the intention of publishing a "slender volume" on "the fundamental principles of Kant's metaphysics as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason" (465), what he

actually left, close to the end of his working life, was so fragmentary that it can- not be understood without reference to Sellars's earlier work on Kant and adds

nothing to it. The collection of the earlier papers into a single volume, how-

ever, is certainly a convenience for students of Sellars and his appropriation of Kant, and Ridgeview Publishing Company might do such an audience an even

greater service by republishing those collected papers alone. As far as the lec- tures preserved by Amaral are concerned, they offer an accessible picture of Sellars's understanding of Kant, and for that reason are helpful in understand-

ing Sellars's appropriation of Kant in Science and Metaphysics. And both the

papers and the lectures add one key point to Science and Metaphysics, which I will mention below. But Science and Metaphysics is important as Sellars's most extended and systematic presentation of the core of his philosophy, not prima- rily as an interpretation of Kant, and it cannot be said that the publication of these lectures is a significant event in current Kant scholarship.

Sellars's philosophy itself is surely worth continued study. Sellars thought of himself as a "scientific realist," and his fundamental aim was to show that a com-

plex model of human thought and rationality was actually more consistent with natural science than what passed for a scientific philosophy of mind at the time when he intervened in the philosophical scene, namely the behaviorisms of

Ryle and Quine. To this end he drew upon the two great philosophers of the tradition who had attempted to construct foundational and comprehensive models of the science of their own times, namely Aristotle and Kant, as well as

Wittgenstein, whose attack upon the idea of a private language underlies Sell- ars's critique of the "myth of the given" in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956) and the constructive project of Science and Metaphysics. What I mean by the last remark is that Sellars's most fundamental thought in opposi- tion to Ryle and Quine was that all our concepts must be learned through the

public use of language, and therefore must in the first instance be applicable to publicly accessible phenomena, which is of course what he learned from Wit-

tgenstein, but that we can and do also learn to use those publicly acquired con-

cepts to think about our own immediately accessible mental episodes even when they are not expressed in publicly accessible behavior and cannot be reduced merely to dispositions to produce publicly accessible behavior. With this license for talking about mental phenomena in a way that Ryle and Quine did not allow, Sellars constructed the following model of human perception, conceptualization, judgment, truth, and knowledge. The basic element of per- ception is representing a "this-such," for example, a pink ice cube or a red brick

facing me, a mental act or event that is typically triggered by the physiological event of sensation caused by an external object but is not equivalent to sensa- tion nor literally contains it (and that might be atypically triggered in the

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absence of its ordinary external cause). This conception of perception Sellars associated with Aristotle's idea of the "tode-ti" and with Kant's idea of an (empir- ical) intuition, although it is debatable whether Kant meant to include a clas- sification as part of an empirical intuition (the "such" part) as opposed to

recognizing that we would have to apply a concept to an intuition in order to have it represent a determinate object, but once having done that could also refer to the concept of the object of which an intuition is taken to be a repre- sentation in order to be able to refer to the intuition itself. (Sicha tries to split the difference between Kant and Sellars on this point by including as part of

perceptual takings themselves concepts but not "kconcepts," or truly general concepts, which are abstracted from the concepts included in intuitions. Here we seem to be leaving Kant behind.) Judgments are then formed by asserting that logically, spatially, and/or temporally permitted associations obtain

among the objects of intuitions ("intuiteds"). The central argument of Science and Metaphysics (its chapter 5) is then thatjudgments can be asserted to be true and can be known when they are part of a "family" a later descendent of which will be included in the body ofjudgments to be asserted by the Peirceian com-

munity of scientists in the final state of science. (Thus, short of being alive at that happy day, we can know an empirical proposition but not know that we know it. But Sellars is not troubled by any skepticism that might arise from this

fact, a point to which I will return in conclusion.) What do Sellars's later essays and lectures on Kant add to this picture? One

thing may be an account of transcendental idealism that is closer to at least one of Kant's original intentions. In Science and Metaphysics, Sellars used Kant's doc- trine as an inspiration for his own account that mental states always contain the

properties of objects that they represent only analogously, and then argued, implausibly, that Kant arrived at his assignment of space and time only to our own representations and not to things in themselves by confusedly inferring from the non-identity of the space and time represented in our ordinary rep- resentations with the idealized space and time of advanced science to the non-

identity of space and time in general with any properties or relations of things as they are in themselves (53-57). Surely Kant made no such inference, falla- cious or not. Instead, his most fundamental argument for transcendental ide- alism was precisely that the universality and necessity of the propositions of the

most advanced mathematics of space and time that could be imagined would be undermined if those propositions were to describe things in themselves as well as our own representations, because while they would be necessarily true of the latter they could be only contingently true of the former (see Critique of Pure Reason A 47-48/B 64-66 and Prolegomena s13, n. 1). In his later presenta- tions of transcendental idealism, Sellars drops this interpretation and instead

emphasizes that space (for example) cannot be a property of things in them-

selves because it is essentially relational, while things considered in themselves are nothing other than things considered apart from their relations (Kant and

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Pre-Kantian Themes, 55); on Sellars's account, then, space cannot literally be a

property of representings, since a mental representation of extension or shape is not itself literally extended or shaped (an argument he always made), nor of

things as they are in themselves, so it can only be something represented that is somehow analogous to but not identical with properties things really have in themselves. Here Sellars leads in the direction of Rae Langton's more recent

approach (Kantian Humility, 1998). This approach, it must be acknowledged, does build on one argument that Kant added to the second edition of the Cri- tique (B 67), but it undermines his own conceptions of noumenal affection in both the theoretical and practical sphere, and does not seem like a promising basis for any attempt to salvage something from transcendental idealism.

Much more interesting and a genuine supplement to the appropriation of Kant in Science and Metaphysics is the picture of objectivity and apperception that Sellars develops in the 1976 lectures and several of the papers. While Sci- ence and Metaphysics had argued that individual judgments can be considered to be true in light of the inclusion of their descendents in the ideal final results of

science, thus stressing what we might call a vertical axis in Sellars's theory of

truth, these later writings stress what we might call a horizontal axis, namely, that a true judgment is always only part of a coherent representation of nature as a whole (e.g., Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes, 101, and "... the I or he or it (the thing) that thinks" in Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics, 342-43). Sellars in turn treats apperception as the recognition that one thinks a judgment, and the

objective unity of apperception as the recognition of one's particularjudgment as part of the whole body ofjudgments about nature. Further, in the later writ-

ings Sellars emphasizes Kant's first and second Analogies of Experience and

especially the Refutation of Idealism, adopting the view that to attribute a

thought, or more importantly a series of thoughts, to ourselves is to attribute these thoughts to a body interacting with other bodies, so that the thought of a thought is itself part of the thought of a world of nature (see Kant and Pre-Kan- tian Themes, 159, and especially "... the I or he or it...," 352-53). This is a crucial move in Sellars's attempt to find a place for thought within a naturalistic view of the world in a way that neither Ryle nor Quine could, and may be the most

important addition these materials make to Science and Metaphysics. One other point that is clearer in the later essays and lectures than it was in

Science and Metaphysics is Sellars's view that what he is providing in his own phi- losophy and through the use of Kant is an analysis of the structure of knowledge and not a proof that we have knowledge. In "Some Remarks on Kant's Theory of Experience" from 1967 he states that "[i]t is also obvious, on reflection, that Kant is not seeking to prove that there is empirical knowledge, but only to show that the concept is a coherent one and that it is such as to rule out the possi- bility that there could be empirical knowledge that is not implicitly of the form 'such and such a state of affairs belongs to a coherent system of states of affairs of which my perceptual experiences are a part'" (Kant's Transcendental Meta-

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physics, 271); in the lectures he asserts that "Kant is not trying to prove that there is a knowable order in time and space. He is asking what is involved in the con-

cept of a knowable order in time and space" (Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes, 154). In this regard, Sellars's approach to Kant is very much of a piece with Peter Strawson's use of Kant as an example of "descriptive metaphysics" in Indi- viduals (1959) and The Bounds of Sense (1966) andJonathan Bennett's interpre- tation of Kant's method as one of "unobvious analysis" in Kant's Analytic (1966) and "Analytic Transcendental Arguments" (in Peter Bieri, Rolf-Peter Horst-

mann, and Lorenz Krfiger, eds., Transcendental Arguments and Science (1979)). Sellars does not see Kant as worrying about skepticism very much, certainly not in the Transcendental Deduction, which could well explain why he focuses his

interpretation of this much-disputed argument on Kant's equation of the unity of apperception with the representation of oneself as representing a whole

world, in s19 of the second edition, rather than on Kant's suggestion earlier (A 116-18, B s16) that the unity of apperception is a representation of self that

depends upon the representation of an objective world, and by its own indisput- able necessity (A 113) thereby guarantees the validity of the latter. Of course, while Sellars's approach is thereby similar to the contemporaneous approaches of Strawson and Bennett, the non-skeptical interpretation of the aims of the Deduction has found subsequent defenders, from Karl Ameriks

("Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument," from 1978,

reprinted in his 2003 volume Interpreting Kant's Critiques) to Gary Hatfield ("What Were Kant's Aims in the Deductiom?" in Philosophical Topics 31, also

2003). So this aspect of Sellars's approach does not irremediably date his work on Kant, although his confidence in it and his failure to anticipate the debate about the method of Kant's Transcendental Deduction and transcendental deductions generally that would be triggered by the work of Strawson and Ben- nett and that still continues do.

Bottom line? The four central Kant articles reprinted in Kant's Transcenden- tal Metaphysics certainly repay continued study, and the 1976 lectures reprinted in Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes might be used to start discussion in an introduc-

tory course on Kant's theoretical philosophy, but would certainly need to be

accompanied with more recent scholarship. But I do not think there is any- thing in this material that will alter the course of contemporary Kant scholar-

ship, and for a presentation of Sellars's own views, surely "Empiricism and the

Philosophy of Mind" and Science and Metaphysics remain the key texts.

PAUL G'UYER

University of Pennsylvania

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