ABSTRACT
Sellars often characterized his project as a Kantian response to the
dominant empiricism of his day. The comparison with Kant is illumi-
nating, but it can also be a trap, masking some important features of
Sellars’s philosophy. It invites one to assimilate Sellars’s distinction
between the manifest and scientific images to Kant’s distinction
between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, for instance, which
Sellars himself at times encourages. While there is something to the
analogy, it requires a commentary. The most obvious disanalogy
between the manifest-scientific image distinction and Kant’s phenom-
enal-noumenal distinction is that Kant’s noumenal realm is in
principle beyond our ken. As a latter-day Critical Realist, Sellars
rejects the idea that reality is in principle beyond our knowledge. In
Sellars’s view, the dogged pursuit of science is in principle capable of
revealing reality as it is in itself. Achieving knowledge of the intrinsic
nature of things may well be indefinitely far off in a Peircean culmi-
nation of enquiry, but the scientific image is not an unknowable
noumenon. The world targeted by the scientific and the manifest
images is one and the same, even if the particular objects in the scien-
tific image and the manifest image differ significantly.
