Transcendental Logic and Sellars' Early Papers

This chapter discusses Sellars’ early (pre-1950) essays in the context of his ambition to articulate a Kantian turn within the philosophical landscape of the ‘new way of words’. Buholzer takes up Sellars’ contention that his own project of ‘pure pragmatics’ might be compared to Kant’s transcendental logic, specifically the idea that a transcendental turn brings in a focus on the content of language or thought. Buholzer assesses the evidence for this parallel in Sellars’ early essays, not in the interest of vindicating a Sellarsian reading of Kant’s transcendental logic but in order to map out Sellars’ indirect engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy in this period. This comparative lens provides new insight into Sellars’ career-long preoccupation with ‘aboutness’, or intentionality, and the abandonment of his early formalist project.