•  12
    The overall contention of this paper, conducted through an examination of the idea of a ‘critical direct realism’ as this was developed across the twentieth century first in the thought of Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) and then in a different form by his son Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), is that such a view, in both its conceptual and sensory representational dimensions, is plausible as a form of direct realism. However, to the extent that the mediating sensory or qualitative dimension was itself …Read more
  •  13
    On Kant’s Janus-Faced Transcendental and Empirical Conception of the Human Being
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (2): 242-252. 2023.
    Recent decades have seen increased attention to the empirical and naturalistic dimensions of Kant’s philosophy, across both his theoretical and practical philosophy. Anik Waldow’s impressively wide...
  •  49
    An Interview with John McDowell on his 2013 Agnes Cuming Lectures (UCD), ‘Two Questions About Perception’
    with John McDowell
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (1): 1-17. 2023.
    In 2013 John McDowell, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, delivered the Agnes Cuming Lectures that are hosted annually by the School of Philosophy at...
  •  3
    This chapter contains sections titled: Central Themes in Kant's Conceptual Revolution Frege, Russell, and the Synthetic A Priori The Rise and Fall of the Analytic A Priori and the Idea of a Relativized A Priori Transcendental Arguments and the Resurgence of Kantian Analytic Philosophy.
  •  95
    What is the myth of the given?
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 10543-10567. 2021.
    The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically…Read more
  •  57
    How to Be a Kantian and a Naturalist about Human Knowledge
    Journal of Philosophical Research 36 327-359. 2011.
    The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects hav…Read more
  •  213
    ‘Comments on Robert Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’
    In David Pereplyotchik & Deborah Barnbaum (eds.), Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 232-243. 2017.
    These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).
  •  291
    What to Take Away from Sellars’s Kantian Naturalism
    In James R. O’Shea, ed., Sellars and His Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016., . 2016.
    ABSTRACT: I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more particularly in relation to the nature and status of what he calls ‘epistemic principles’; and I attempt to show that this remains a plausible and distinctive position even when detached from Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible objects of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist, i.e., as conceived within that common sense framework. I fir…Read more
  •  271
    Concepts of Objects as Prescribing Laws: A Kantian and Pragmatist Line of Thought
    In Robert Stern and Gabriele Gava, eds., Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy (London: Routledge): pp. 196–216., . pp. 196-216. 2016.
    Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he …Read more
  •  482
    ‘Psychological Nominalism’ and the Given, from Abstract Entities to Animal Minds
    In In: Patrick J. Reider, ed., Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism (London and New York: Bloomsbury), 2017: pp. 19–39, . pp. 19-39. 2017.
    ABSTRACT: Sellars formulated his thesis of 'psychological nominalism' in two very different ways: (1) most famously as the thesis that 'all awareness of sorts…is a linguistic affair', but also (2) as a certain thesis about the 'psychology of the higher processes'. The latter thesis denies the standard view that relations to abstract entities are required in order to explain human thought and intentionality, and asserts to the contrary that all such mental phenomena can in principle ‘be account…Read more
  •  193
    Thought, Freedom, and Embodiment in Kant and Sellars
    In Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by David Pereplyotchik and Deborah Barnbaum, Studies in American Philosophy Series (London: Routledge), pp. 15–35. ISBN 9781138670624, . 2017.
    ABSTRACT: Sellars once remarked on the “astonishing extent to which in ethics as well as in epistemology and metaphysics the fundamental themes of Kant’s philosophy contain the truth of the variations we now hear on every side” (SM x). Also astonishing was Sellars’ 1970 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association (APA), which borrowed its title from the phrase in Kant’s Paralogisms, “...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks...” (B404). In its compact twenty-five pages…Read more
  •  433
    Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy: The ‘Analytic’ Tradition
    In Mark Timmons & Sorin Baiasu (eds.), The Kantian Mind, Routledge. 2024.
    ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the…Read more
  •  365
    ABSTRACT: I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends a long line of nominalistic thinking about the nature of the categories from Ockham and Kant to the Tractatus and Carnap, and that this theory is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’s most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of …Read more
  •  191
    ABSTRACT: I examine how Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism in After Finitude, as I understand it, relates firstly to Kant’s transcendental idealist philosophy, and secondly to the analytic Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars. I argue that central to the views of both Kant and Sellars is what might be called, with an ambivalent nod to Meillassoux, an objective correlationism. What emerges in the end as the recommended upshot of these analyses is a naturalistic Kantianism that takes the form o…Read more
  •  385
    Sellars' Exam Question Trilemma - Are Kant's Premises Analytic, or Synthetic A Priori, or A Posterior
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (2): 402-421. 2019.
    ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of what I…Read more
  •  332
    ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist concepti…Read more
  •  306
    Abstract: Any normative inferentialist view confronts a set of challenges in the form of how to account for the sort of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary that is involved, paradigmatically, in our noninferential perceptual responses and knowledge claims. This chapter lays out that challenge, and then argues that Sellars’ original multilayered account of such noninferential responses in the context of his normative inferentialist semantics and epistemology shows how the inferentialist ca…Read more
  •  674
    ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its motivation and in its content, whether considered conceptually, historically, or in his own estimation, and that this is the case even in the important respects in which his views differ from most pragmatists. However, this assessment has been rejected by many recent pragmatists, with “classicalist” pragmatists frequently objecting to Sellars’s analytic-pragmatist privileging of language at the alleged…Read more
  •  787
    ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James co…Read more
  •  14
    Wilfrid Sellars and His Legacy
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of …Read more
  •  381
    O'Shea concludes that Sellars's attempts to preserve the core truths in Kant's theory of experience and to integrate them with an overall scientific naturalist outlook can and should survive the rejection of several central components of Sellars's proposed adaptation of Kant's transcendental idealism: ABSTRACT: "Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own…Read more
  •  2
    Book reviews (review)
    with James Daly, Eileen Brennan, Mark Haugaard, Josephine Newman, J. C. A. Gaskin, J. D. G. Evans, Bernhard Weiss, Thomas Docherty, Hugh Bredin, Joseph Dunne, Paschal O'Gorman, Tim Crane, William Desmond, Daniel H. Cohen, Desmond M. Clarke, Iseult Honohan, and Charles Hummel
    Humana Mente 1 (2): 354-392. 1993.
  •  23
    A Tension in Pragmatist and Neo-Pragmatist Conceptions of Meaning and Experience
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (2). 2014.
    This paper examines a lasting tension in pragmatism between broadly functionalist outlooks on meaning and a primacy placed on what can be revealed by direct experiential or practical encounters. Both the inferentialist and experiential emphases can be traced back to Peirce’s original pragmatic maxim. Here the tension is examined first in William James’s insightful views on intentionality and experience, followed by a diagnosis of the problem as it has arisen in neo­pragmatist debates concerning …Read more
  •  17
    Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2017.
    Kant's monumental book the Critique of Pure Reason was arguably the most conceptually revolutionary work in the history of philosophy and its impact continues to be felt throughout philosophical debates today. However, it is a notoriously difficult work whose basic meaning and lasting philosophical significance are both subject to ongoing controversy. In this Critical Guide, an international team of leading Kant scholars addresses the challenges, clarifying Kant's basic terms and arguments and e…Read more
  •  9
    Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    Kant's monumental book the Critique of Pure Reason was arguably the most conceptually revolutionary work in the history of philosophy and its impact continues to be felt throughout philosophical debates today. However, it is a notoriously difficult work whose basic meaning and lasting philosophical significance are both subject to ongoing controversy. In this Critical Guide, an international team of leading Kant scholars addresses the challenges, clarifying Kant's basic terms and arguments, and …Read more
  •  356
    Kantian Reflections on the Givenness of Zahavi’s Minimal Experiential Self
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (5): 619-625. 2015.
    At the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a decisive break with certain fundamental Cartesian assumptions or claims about consciousness and self-consciousness, claims that have nonetheless remained perennially tempting, from a phenomenological perspective, independently of any further questions concerning the metaphysics of mind and its place in nature. The core of this philosophical problem has recently been helpfully exposed and insightfully probed in Dan Zahavi’s book, Self and Other:…Read more
  •  1252
    This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant du…Read more
  •  73
    In this article I consider how the very different but equally Sellars inspired views of Robert Brandom and Ruth Millikan serve to highlight both the deep difficulties and the prospects for a solution to what is arguably the most central problem raised by Sellars’s attempted “stereoscopic fusion” of the “manifest” and “scientific images”: namely, the question of the nature and place of norm-governed conceptual thinking within the natural world. I distinguish two “stereoscopic tasks”: (1) the pos…Read more