| For some time Wilfrid Sellars has been considered one of the foremost contemporary interpreters of Kant. Sellars is at the forefront of the trend towards the analytical reworking of the philosophical tradition. This thesis is a response to that trend. I examine the Sellarsian position on Kant's theory of intuitions in order to point out the shortcomings of the former's view. In particular Sellars' doctrines of analogical predication and counterpart characteristics are subjected to scrutiny. Sellars believes that Kant's theories of space and time are muddled. To avoid these Kantian muddles Sellars postulates a realm of unapperceived conscious states which he identifies with sense impressions. Sense impressions are then distinguished from inuitions proper which, on Sellars' view, are full-blown conceptual representations of a "this-such" variety. Though sense impressions are distinct from intuitions, Sellars believes that sense impressions "guide from without" the intuitions associated with them.;Sellars also violates Critical principles in his characterization of intuitions as conceptual representations best represented by this-such locutions. The conflation of intuitions and concepts contradicts such Kantian tenets as the judgemental nature of thought, the faculty theory of the mind and the nature of intellectual intuition. Finally, Sellars' views on the "Schematism" are considered in the light of basic Critical principles. Here, too, it is pointed out that Sellars misinterprets fundamental Kantian doctrines such as the nature of schemata, the function of the productive and reproductive imagination, and the place of the categories in experience.;At the heart of Sellars' discussion is the view that intuitions and sense impressions share second-order properties only--that is, that there exists a relationship of mere structural isomorphism between the sensory and the conceptual level. Hence, the first-order characteristics of the conceptual level have counterpart characteristics at the level of sense. However, such a view violates principle tenets of the Critical philosophy. For it implies that one would be unable to distinguish an awareness of appearances from that of things-in-themselves. |
