Sense-certainty and the ‘‘this-such’’

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is knowledge’s voyage of self-discovery. It begins with the mere appearance of knowledge – that is, what knowledge at first seems to be. But what knowledge at first seems to be is not congruent with its reality, even in its first appearance. The incongruence creates an instability that pushes knowledge on to other ways to take itself, stopping only when a conception of knowledge has been developed on which knowledge seems to be exactly what it is. My concern here is an examination of one of the opening arguments in the ‘‘sense-Certainty’’ chapter of the Phenomenology, showing how the moves Hegel tracks in the ‘‘senseCertainty’’ chapter provide an important supplement to the analysis of perceptual knowledge provided by Wilfrid Sellars (1967).