Intentionality in Sellars

"Sellars is now recognized as a philosopher who defended the broadly Kantian view that the contentfulness of our thought and intentionality is a matter of the largely implicit and social prescription of rules or laws that are of the understanding’s own making, in the ‘space of reasons’. This normative account has generally been detached from the more naturalistic side of Sellars’ story that emphasizes our environmental embeddedness, and in particular the nature of the systematic causal hookups and representational mappings between mind and world that Sellars called ‘picturing’. Seiberth’s book on Sellars is the first to explain in systematic depth the Kantian transcendental method that constituted Sellars’ attempt to bring both of those sides of the story together in their necessary and dynamic interdependence. The convincing result is that the normative story of our intentionality cannot be told without the scientific naturalist story, and vice versa."

James O’Shea, University College Dublin, Ireland

"It has long been accepted that Sellars is a Kantian philosopher, but until now we lacked a detailed understanding of what that meant and why it mattered. Seiberth’s monograph demonstrates in detail that Sellars was not just a Kantian philosopher but also a first-rate Kant scholar. Seiberth shows that Sellars’s claims about Kant can withstand intense critical scrutiny and meticulous comparison with Kant’s texts and arguments. With hermeneutic sensitivity and analytic acumen Seiberth shows that Sellars’s engagement with Kant is inseparable from his philosophy. He also shows that contemporary Kant scholars cannot afford to ignore Sellars."

Carl B. Sachs, Marymount University, USA

"In this serious, in-depth book, the author underlines the strong Kantian streak in Sellars’s system and emphasizes the crucial work of the picture theory, two fundamental yet often neglected aspects of Sellars’s theory of intentionality."

Patrice Philie, University of Ottawa, Canada