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32The Metaphysics of Mind (review)Idealistic Studies 22 (3): 236-238. 1992.The Metaphysics of Mind is metaphysics in the logical-reconstruction-of-language mode. Tye claims the assertions of ordinary folk psychology are frequently true and attacks the idea that there are any mental events, but he is not, on the whole, concerned with what kinds of theories are best able to handle the empirical evidence we have. Rather, Tye’s central focus is an argument that the ontological commitments of psychological discourse in general are very minimal: just “persons and other senti…Read more
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94Hegel on reference and knowledgeJournal of the History of Philosophy 26 (2): 297-307. 1988.A refutation of claims by, e.g., Hamlyn or Soll, that Hegel denies our ability to refer to or knowledge individual objects.
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109Sellars, Animals, and ThoughtProblems From Sellarsan examination of Wilfrid Sellars position of the mental capacities of non-human animals.
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134Just What is the Relation between the Manifest and the Scientific Images?International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (1): 112-128. 2016.Robert B. Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism ranges widely over fundamental issues in metaphysics, with occasional forays into epistemology as well. The centerpiece is what Brandom calls ‘the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality’. This is ‘[t]he claim that in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything that one needs to know how to do, in principle, to use alethic modal vocabulary – in particular subjunctive conditionals’. Despite clai…Read more
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71Burgeoning skepticismErkenntnis 33 (2): 141-164. 1990.This paper shows that the resources mobilized by recent arguments against individualism in the philosophy of mind also suffice to construct a good argument against a Humean-style skepticism about our knowledge of extra-mental reality. The argument constructed, however, will not suffice to lay to rest the attacks of a truly global skeptic who rejects the idea that we usually know what our occurrent mental states are.
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160Wilfrid SellarsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.
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155Sellars vs. McDowell on the Structure of Sensory ConsciousnessDiametros 27 47-63. 2011.I argue that John McDowell’s attempt to refute Wilfrid Sellars’s two-component analysis of perceptual experience and substitute for it a conception according to which perceptual experience is the “conceptual shaping of sensory consciousness” fails. McDowell does not recognize the subtle dialectic in Sellars’s thought between transcendental and empirical considerations in favor of a substantive conception of sense impressions, and McDowell’s own proposal seems to empty the notion of sensory consc…Read more
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43Review of Jay F. Rosenberg, Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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26Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (review)Philosophical Review 93 (3): 450. 1984.a book review of Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism by Michael Rosen
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37Is Sellars's Rylean hypothesis plausible? A dialogueIn Michael P. Wolf & Mark Norris Lance (eds.), The Self-Correcting Enterprise: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Rodopi. pp. 85-114. 2006.A dialogue between someone who finds Sellars's Rylean myth in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" quite implausible and another who defends it.
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95Wilfrid SellarsMcgill-Queen's University Press. 2005.Wilfrid Sellars has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century". He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". H…Read more
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581Hegelian Spirits in Sellarsian BottlesPhilosophical Studies 1-12. 2016.Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do ‘‘hang together.’’ Hegel’s unity …Read more
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8Sense-certainty and the 'this-such'In Dean Moyar & Michael Quante (eds.), Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2008.This article shows how Hegel's 'Sense-Certainty' chapter fills in a gap in Kant's and Sellars's critique of empiricism by supplying an argument that even indexical reference presupposes and is mediated by a larger conceptual framework.
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27Meaning and Interpretation in HistoryHistory and Theory 22 (3): 253-263. 1983.The translationist theory of meaning can provide a plausible understanding of the reenactment methodology of history, although there are disanalogies. It takes as primitive our ability to recognize synonymy relations between linguistic episodes, either within the same language or other languages. In translating a complex linguistic object translators must possess an incredibly large stock of background knowledge about a culture and be sensitive and resourceful speakers of the language into which…Read more
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28Folk psychology, theories, and the Sellarsian rootsIn Michael P. Wolf (ed.), The Self-Correcting Enterprise: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Volume 9, Rodopi. pp. 53-84. 2006.Wilfrid Sellars has often be proclaimed the father of the "theory theory" of psychological knowledge. This article exposes what is true and and what is false in this claim.
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440Sellars, Realism, and Kantian ThinkingNormative Functionalism and the Pittsburgh School. 2012.This essay is a response to Patrick Reider’s essay “Sellars on Perception, Science and Realism: A Critical Response.” Reider is correct that Sellars’s realism is in tension with his generally Kantian approach to issues of knowledge and mind, but I do not think Reider’s analysis correctly locates the sources of that tension or how Sellars himself hoped to be able to resolve it. Reider’s own account of idealism and the reasons supporting it are rooted in the epistemological tradition that informed…Read more
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52The Dialectic of TeleologyPhilosophical Topics 19 (2): 51-70. 1991.The is a reading of Hegel's chapter on teleology in the Science of Logic. It argues that inadequacies in the intentional model of teleology that dominated both pre-Kantian and Kantian thought about teleology force us to recognize a much more Aristotelian conception of natural teleology that must be presupposed to make sense of the teleology of intentions.
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37Review: McDowell, The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays and Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (8). 2009.
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2349Hegel's theory of mental activity: an introduction to theoretical spiritCornell University Press. 1988.An interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit showing its continued relevance to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.
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48All in the FamilyIn Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics, Wiley. 2013.This article considers Ruth Millikan's relationship to Robert Brandom and most especially their common influence, Wilfrid Sellars.
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49Wilfrid Sellars (review)Review of Metaphysics 61 (4): 854-855. 2005.A brief "book note" on James O'Shea's "Wilfrid Sellars"
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19Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of PhilosophyIn James R. O'Shea & Eric M. Rubenstein (eds.), Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg, Ridgeview Publishing Co.. 2010.The "Transcendental Deduction" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the great mirrors of philosophy. By that I mean that there seems to be no steady and unchanging image to be found in that text; each philosopher who approaches it finds in it a reflection of his or her own deepest concerns. Jay Rosenberg's new book, "Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason" is no exception. Rosenberg lays out a different approach to the central argument of the first Cri…Read more
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47Sellars and the myth of the givenIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
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125Naturalism, the Autonomy of Reason, and PicturesInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3): 395-413. 2010.Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic . There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committe…Read more
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