ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Wilfrid Sellars's metaphilosophy can provide support for the thesis that the history of philosophy is internally related to what philosophy is, in that the former is implicated in the very content of philosophical problems. In order to show this it sketches a post-Kantian 'critical' conception of philosophy according to which the latter can be practiced adequately only if it is self-critical and self-reflective. The critical turn in philosophy, inaugurated by Kant, and his Critique of Pure Reason, and 'completed' by Hegel, developed an essentially self-critical and self-reflective conception of the philosophical enterprise. The chapter argues that, at a more specific level, Sellars's metaphilosophical construal of what he famously calls the 'manifest image' and the 'scientific image' of 'man-in-the-world' is the key to understand the way in which philosophy proper is internally related to the history of philosophy.
