Abstract

Empirical knowledge is at once an exercise of freedom and rationally constrained by how things are. But if the reality on which empirical thought aims to bear is outside the sphere of the conceptual then, while it can exert a causal constraint on knowing, it cannot exert a rational constraint. Empirical reality both must and, so it seems, cannot have rational bearing on empirical thought. I consider the related ways Kant and Sellars try to avoid this antinomy, arguing that understanding the relationship between their views reveals how unsatisfactory both are, and what might be said instead