ABSTRACT
Sellars’s major impacts on twentieth-century philosophy have been in
epistemology and philosophy of mind. As we turn to his philosophy of
mind, there are some boundary issues that the reader should be aware
of right from the start. How is the philosophy of mind delimited? In
most post-Cartesian discussions, ‘mind’ covers both intentional and
sensory states. Discussions of the “mind-body problem” focus indiffer-
ently on pains and thoughts. Sellars thinks this is a major mistake, for
he recognizes two problems: the mind-body problem proper, which
concerns the relation between intentional and bodily states, and the
sensorium-body problem, which concerns the relation between
sensory and bodily states. In Sellars’s eyes, Kant’s most important
single lesson is that thoughts and sensations are different in kind, a
lesson that too many philosophers still have not learned. Mental
states, according to Sellars, are intentional states.1 Thus, purely sen-
sory states are not mental states at all, a result that seems to run coun-
ter to the (tutored) intuitions of many philosophers. In his view we also
need to distinguish between perceptual states – which are intentional
states, although mixed with a sensory and non-conceptual component
– and purely sensory states. Still, given the long tradition of including
the sensory in the mental, the philosophy of mind includes de facto the
treatment of the sensory and, accordingly, Sellars frequently uses
‘mind’ to include the sensory. His theory of the sensory will be the focus
of Chapter 8. In this chapter we shall focus on the intentional.
