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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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2343Hegel'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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1Getting beyond idealismsIn Willem A. DeVries (ed.), Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford University Press. 2009.This paper investigates Sellars's complex attitude towards idealism. It distinguishes between the epistemologically-based arguments that led many empiricists to idealism and a different set of more purely metaphysical arguments that came to dominate in German Idealism. Sellars resolutely rejects all of the epistemological arguments for idealism, but shows much greater sympathy with the metaphysical arguments. It is then argued that Sellars introduced his notion of picturing to avoid falling i…Read more
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83The Dialectic of TeleologyPhilosophical Topics 19 (2): 51-70. 1991.An analysis of Hegel's chapter on teleology in the Science of Logic. Hegel argues that the 'intentional model' of teleology assumed by Kant actually presupposes a natural or organic teleology more like along Aristotelian lines.
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49Review of Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (4). 2008.
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37In the Space of Reasons (review)Review of Metaphysics 61 (4): 860-862. 2008.a "book note" on this collection of selected essays by Wilfrid Sellars
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58Brandom's two-ply errorIn Willem A. DeVries (ed.), Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford University Press. 2009.Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.
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65Who sees with equal eye,... Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd?Philosophical Studies 71 (2): 191-200. 1993.A comment the paper by Brian McLaughlin in the same volume, this paper raises questions about whether the classicism/connectionism debate is really well-formed.
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97Ontology and the Completeness of Sellars’s Two ImagesHumana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 1-18. 2012.Sellars claims completeness for both the “manifest” and the “scientific images” in a way that tempts one to assume that they are independent of each other, while, in fact, they must share at least one common element: the language of individual and community intentions. I argue that this significantly muddies the waters concerning his claim of ontological primacy for the scientific image, though not in favor of the ontological primacy of the manifest image. The lesson I draw is that we need to r…Read more
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117Sellars' "Rylean myth"In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.A summary of the "Rylean myth" (aka "the myth of Jones") from Wilfrid Sellars' classic article "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He uses this "myth" to motivate the idea that our concepts of mental states are like theoretical concepts, developed to fulfill an explanatory role, and not at all somehow 'given' to us by direct acquaintance with instances of mental states.
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5Reality, Knowledge, and the Good Life: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy (edited book)St. Martin's Press. 1991.An historical introduction to philosophy.
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31Hegel and SkepticismPhilosophical Review 101 (2): 401. 1992.This is a review of Forster's book.
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91Does observational knowledge require metaknowledge? A dialogue on SellarsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1). 2007.In the following dialogue between TT - a foundationalist - and WdeV - a Sellarsian, we offer our differing assessments of the principle for observational knowledge proposed in Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'. Sellars writes: 'For a Konstatierung "This is green" to "express observational knowledge", not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of "This is green" are symptoms of the…Read more
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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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