ABSTRACT
For Wilfrid Sellars, conversation with past figures is an essential aspect of doing philosophy. Rene Descartes belongs to his preferred dialogue partners. This is not the case because he considers Descartes's views to be true, but because he thinks that Descartes is a philosopher whose views, although in many respects wrong, provide the opportunity to learn important insights. Descartes is revolutionary in his mechanical natural philosophy and his rejection of scholastic hylomorphism, which he replaces by his dualism of substance types. As Sellars sees it, Descartes presents at best merely with a proto-theory rather than a full-blown theory of intentionality. Sellars recognizes that Descartes applies two different metaphors in his account of mental representation: the image metaphor and the container metaphor. Sellars's reading implies that the objects in ideas are intermediaries between the representing mind and the represented object external to the mind. This is a classic reading of Descartes as a so-called 'indirect realist.'
