Claudia Cavaliere

One recurring framework for interpreting the relationship between nature and culture in Wittgenstein's philosophy is that of so-called "liberal naturalism." Proponents of this reading point to the naturalistic undertones of several key concepts from his later work — "language game," "form of life," "facts of nature," "natural history," and so on — arguing that these concepts situate human practice in continuity with our biology, thereby reflecting the deep entanglement of the natural and the symbolic-cultural dimensions that characterizes human life. In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of this attribution on two grounds. First, I argue that Wittgenstein's writings do not provide sufficient warrant for labeling his philosophy naturalist — unless "naturalism" is to be understood as an empty category. To make this case, I focus on first-person psychological avowals, which, given their ties to physiological and natural reactions, might seem like the strongest possible evidence for Wittgenstein's alleged naturalism. I argue that they are not. Second, I contend that reading Wittgenstein's account of the nature-culture relationship through a naturalist lens is, in any case, ill-advised, as it tends to flatten the complexity of that relationship — ultimately at the expense of the cultural dimension.

In this article I examine Wilfrid Sellars’s account of linguistic rules and rule-following, with a special focus on how the topic emerges and develops in his earliest philosophical writings. In the first part of the article, I show how Sellars’s distinctively original approach to rules and rule-following is elaborated in the project of pure pragmatics in the late 1940s, through which he confronts Carnap’s idea of language as calculus and replaces it with the notion of an empirically meaningful language. The key point is the realization that a meaningful language cannot be reduced to a list of syntactic constraints supplemented by designation rules; it also requires conformation rules that reflect the material constraints of the world in which the language is embedded. This holistic, normative, nonrelational account of language and meaning anticipates Sellars’s later inferentialism, in which material rules of inference are constitutive of meaning. In the second part of the article, I address the wider problem of how rules can be embodied in behavior, which Sellars tackles from the point of view of the classic rule-following dilemma. The gist of his solution lies in the evolutionary-inspired notion of pattern-governed behaviour, which allows Sellars to show how it is possible for language learners to internalize rules in their practices without prior explicit cognitive awareness of them. Such account, refined in the interlacing of language-entry, intralinguistic, and language-exit transitions into a unified picture of concept acquisition, integrates the normative and natural dimension of linguistic activity.

My dissertation is devoted to an analysis of the early writings of Wilfrid Sellars, which I take to span from 1947 to 1954. The topic has been chosen based on the disproportion between the ever-expanding stream of publications devoted to Sellars’ philosophy on the one hand, and the considerable lack of attention accorded to his so-called “early phase” on the other. In chapter 1, I focus on Sellars’ earliest project of pure pragmatics. Contrasting the only interpretation available in literature, I argue that pure pragmatics is consistent with Sellars’ later, better known and more successful philosophy, and I show how several themes that would characterize his later project have their roots in pure pragmatics. In chapter 2, I analyze the essays published after the apparent abandonment of pure pragmatics. I contextualize them by providing, for each of them, the more or less covert background from which Sellars drew. I show how in these years (1948-1950) the way is paved to the overcoming of relational theories of meaning through the development of Sellars’ nominalism. Chapter 3 is devoted to a series of long and sophisticated essays published at the end of the “early phase”. Here, functional role semantics is given a comprehensive exposition and some related problems are discussed. The adoption of a pragmatist stance towards conceptual frameworks grants Sellars’ philosophy with the ability to be responsive both to human interests in the broad sense, and to the ontologically grounded scientific advancements of any epoch. Finally, Sellars’ characteristic tension concerning the place of norms in nature is eased by combining his reflections on the “double life” of linguistic behavior with the formulation of the irreducibility-cum-reducibility principle.

At B19, Kant summarizes the general problem of pure reason in the problem of synthetic a priori judgments. The vicissitudes that have affected last century’s philosophy are, in this sense, a confirmation of its significance: the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge has indeed crossed all the major philosophical currents of the twentieth century, being treated in a wide variety of ways by phenomenologists, logical empiricists, and pragmatists. One of the most original treatments of the issue is that offered by the young Wilfrid Sellars between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, consisting of a hybridization of different traditions. In this paper I will present Sellars’ unique re-elaboration of the notion of the synthetic a priori as it is elaborated in his early writings, showing how his interweaving of themes from pragmatism, phenomenology and logical empiricism leads not just to what I believe is the only possible approach for a realist philosopher, but also to an unexpected Kantian solution in spirit.