There's been recently an interest in the possible relationships between Sellars and Marx. This presentation intends to contribute to this discussion by tackling briefly one specific aspect of this topic, namely, the issue of real abstractions in the Marxian framework and the Sellarsian problem of the critique of the Given. It is usually accepted that there are two forms of the Given to be criticized in Sellars' "Empiricism and the philosophy of mind": the epistemic and the categorial givens. The epistemic form of the Given corresponds to the idea of something that is both epistemically independent and efficacious- meaning it is something that is not the result of previous cognitive states, while transmitting "positive epistemic status to other cognitive states of ours" (DeVries, 2005, p. 99) . The second is the idea that " the categorial structure of the world—if it has a categorial structure—imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on melted wax’ (Sellars, 1981a: I, §45)". Rejecting both forms of the Given yields a distinctive division of labor between sensible contents and conceptual workings in the Sellarsian picture. On the other hand, the idea of real abstraction as proposed within the Marxian tradition eschews traditional divisions between the mental and the real, the abstract and the concrete, the sensible and the conceptual, committing to a causally efficacious figure of abstraction that "is the form of the thought previous and external to the thought" (Zizek, 1989, 19)- which amounts to a "veritable expropriation of abstract thought" (Toscano, 2013, 280).

For the prospect of a Post-Sellarsian form of Marxism the question then becomes: does the hypothesis of a real abstraction fall unto a form of the Given? What is the proper account of the relationship between thought (in the strict sense) and material practice that correctly attributes the roles of condition and conditioned? Under what conditions the thought of real abstraction is compatible with the Sellarsian framework?

(Jean-Pierre Caron)