Kant - Sellars Conference -Johannes Haag ; Transcendental Realism.

Wilfrid Sellars developed his own philosophy in constant exchange with Kantian thought. In what follows I would like to show how some of the theses central to Sellars's own systematic approach are most appropriately understood if one acknowledges their methodological and argumentative foundation in Transcendental Philosophy. In particular I will be concerned with the two most famous criticisms Sellars subjects Kant’s theory to: his critique of the Kantian arguments for the phenomenality or transcendental ideality of empirical reality and his rejection of the Kantian agnosticism concerning the thing in itself. It is, maybe somewhat surprisingly, in this criticism that the Kantian foundation of Sellars's thought can be most convincingly uncovered. This initial amazement will probably lessen considerably as soon as one recalls that Sellars’s own doctrine of scientific realism – the possibility in principle of our attaining knowledge of objective reality as it is in itself by way of scientific investigation – implies the phenomenality of empirical reality as conceived in the manifest image. Sellars himself is a trancendental idealist concerning empirical reality as conceived within the manifest image. His transcendental realism concerning the ideal scientific image of empirical reality thus implies this transcendental ideality of the manifest world. In this paper my aim is to show that Sellars’s scientific realism is not due to a philosophically more or less unfounded naturalistic or scientistic prejudice, but should be seen as the necessary result of an analysis of the phenomenology of perception on the one hand, together with Sellars's adaptation of the transcendental methodology. Kant-Sellars Conference 2014 Moderated by Jim Conant Day 1 Talk 1