ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the main contours of Sellars's interpretation of Kant's theoretical philosophy, focusing on the occasion on its most controversial aspect: his complex engagements with Kant's transcendental idealist distinction between objects as 'appearances' and as 'things in themselves'. The first chapter of Science and Metaphysics partly defends and partly criticizes Kant's version of this distinction by seeking to expose and clarify its ambiguities when presented in terms of Sellars's own distinctions. Sellars's strongly ontological reading of Kant's things in themselves has stressed Kant's use of analogical thinking 'in theological contexts', no doubt thinking of Kant's various ways of spelling out reason's experience-transcending ideas of the 'unconditioned' as 'ground of the appearances' in nature , in both morally practical and regulative-theoretical terms. Occasionally Sellars, and his student Jay Rosenberg after him, suggest that Kant also held something like Sellars’s own view of the analogical structure of ‘things in themselves’.
