James O'Shea

This chapter analyzes Sellars’s uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and concerning ‘epistemic principles’ in particular. This remains a plausible and distinctive position when detached from Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible _objects_ (as opposed to _persons_ and norms) of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist. Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to _persons_. In a view inspired by Kant, persons as thinkers and agents for Sellars exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this enables an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology that is independent of Sellars’s merely quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. This defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes is what is most fundamental in Sellars’s complex and controversial views on the nature and status of fundamental epistemic principles.

Wilfrid Sellars’s most central and enduring task was that of defending a broadly Kantian conception of our conceptual cognition while at the same time attempting to sketch how to naturalize scientifically that same conception. It was this career-long search for a stereoscopic synoptic vision, along with the various groundbreaking ideas concerning mind, knowledge, and meaning that Sellars developed in its wake, that has been the primary source of the subsequent forks in the road that have been carved out by the so-called ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ Sellarsians. This introductory chapter discusses both the intellectual origins and the fruitfully divided legacy of these dominant themes in Sellars’s thought, followed by synopses of all of the contributions to the volume made by some of the most distinguished philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars’s work.

Ce que l’on appelle désormais l’« École de Pittsburgh » est en partie connu pour les différentes façons dont ses représentants ont adapté des idées centrales de Kant. Dans cet article, j’examine comment Sellars, R. Brandom et J. McDowell se sont approprié, chacun à leur manière, les conceptions kantiennes du « sens interne » et de l’« aperception ». Ce qui est frappant, c’est la divergence des perspectives philosophiques qui ont émergé de ce noyau commun d’idées, illustrée ici par le contraste entre les conceptions de Sellars sur le sens interne et l’aperception, et celles de R. Brandom et de J. McDowell.

The Cambridge Companion to Marx Edited by Terrell Carver Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 357. ISBN 0–521–36625–9 £40.00 hbk. Paul Ricoeur By Stephen H. Clark Routledge, 1990. Pp. 216. ISBN 0–415–02309–2. £30.00 hbk. £9.99 pbk. The Analysis of Political Structure By David Easton Routledge, 1990. Pp. xv + 336 ISBN 0–415–90310–6. £35.00 hbk. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism By Owen Flanagan Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. 393. ISBN 0–674–93218–8. £27.95. God and Greek Philosophy By L. P. Gerson Routledge, 1990. Pp. xi + 340. ISBN 0–415–02219–3. £35.00. Scepticism By Christopher Hookway Routledge, 1990. Pp. xii + 251. ISBN 0–415–03396–9. £35.00 hbk. Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy By Peter Hylton Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. 420. ISBN 0–19–824626–9. £50 hbk. £15.95 pbk The Poetics of Imagining: from Husserl to Lyotard By Richard Kearney Harper Collins, 1991. Pp. xiii + 234. ISBN 04–445–4503. £30.00. The Language of Art History Edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 255. ISBN 0–521–35384‐X. £32.50. Newman After a Hundred Years Edited by Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 470. ISBN 0–19–812–8916 £45.00 Inference to the Best Explanation By Peter Lipton Routledge, 1991. Pp. x + 194. ISBN 0–415–05886–4. £35.00 hbk. Dretske and His Critics Edited by Brian McLaughlin Blackwell, 1991. Pp. xvii + 231. ISBN 1–55786–198–6. £40.00. A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel By Giacomo Rinaldi The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Pp. 525. $99.95 hbk. The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume By Galen Strawson Clarendon Press, 1989 (1992 issued in paperback with corrections). Pp. xiv + 291. ISBN 0–19–824038–4. £14.95 pbk. Analysis and Metaphysics By P. F. Strawson Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 152. ISBN 0–19–875517–6. £22.50 hbk; £7.95 pbk. Physics and Metaphysics: Theories of Space and Time By Jennifer Trusted Routledge, 1991. Pp. xii + 210. ISBN 0–415–05948–8. £30.00. Political Theory and Postmodernism By Stephen K. White Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 153. ISBN 0–521–40122–4. £25.00 hbk. ISBN 0–521–40948–9. £9.95 pbk. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art By Julian Young Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 170. ISBN 0–521–51124–6. £27.95.

The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work. The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.

"Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" remains one of the landmark works of Western philosophy. Most philosophy students encounter it at some point in their studies but at nearly 700 pages of detailed and complex argument it is also a demanding and intimidating read. James O'Shea's short introduction to "CPR" aims to make it less so. Aimed at students coming to the book for the first time, it provides step by step analysis in clear, unambiguous prose. The conceptual problems Kant sought to resolve are outlined, and his conclusions concerning the nature of the faculty of human knowledge and possibility of metaphysics, and the arguments for those conclusions, are explored. In addition he shows how the "Critique" fits into the history of modern philosophy and how transcendental idealism affected the course of philosophy. Key concepts are explained throughout and the student is provided with an excellent route map through the various parts of the text.

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 conceived by both thinkers in what I characterize as strongly ‘phenomenal realist’ terms, the resulting philosophical commitments were of a kind that most current direct realists would generally not accept, even in cases where they themselves are phenomenal realists (perhaps naïve realists). The various perceiver-dependent forms of that additional, perhaps detachable commitment of most critical realists is likely responsible for the assessment of William Pepperell Montague (1873–1953) and other ‘neo-realists’ that ‘critical realism’ is not really, as advertised by Roy Wood Sellars, a version of direct realism, but ultimately a retreat to indirect realism. However, I argue that in both of its primary conceptual and sensory representational commitments, ‘critical direct realism’ remains a plausible competitor to direct acquaintance versions of direct realism.

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 been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given, since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses –both turn out to be mistaken.

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 first explain the complex Kant-inspired sense in which Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to persons. In this primary Kantian sense, I suggest, persons as thinkers and agents exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this in principle would enable an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology, one that is independent of Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. Finally, I examine in some detail how this defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes turns out to be what is fundamental in Sellars’s complex and controversial views on the nature and status of epistemic principles.

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 developed as an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content.

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 accounted for causally' without any use of normative terms in the explanation. Recent 'Hegelian Sellarsians' such as Rorty, McDowell, and Brandom have argued that the holistic, normative themes in (1) support various non-realist or rather (German) 'idealist but common-sense realist' outlooks. By contrast, Sellars' own defenses of (2) reveal psychological nominalism itself to be a naturalistic empiricism intended to sustain the normative-holistic themes in (1) within an exhaustively scientific naturalist conception of reality.

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 Sellars managed to sketch novel yet plausible reconstructions of central aspects of Kant’s views on self-knowledge, persons, freedom, and morality, along the way suggesting how all of those Kantian views could plausibly be rendered consistent with a naturalistic ontology. In this chapter I focus on Sellars’ APA address as an occasion for reflection on how both Kant and Sellars offer insights into how we ought best to conceive the nature of and the relationships between our thinking selves, our practical agency, and our entirely natural, material embodiment.

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 basis for presenting some of the most familiar ‘analytic Kantian’ themes that continue to animate current debates. I also argue that the complex relationships between Sellars’ philosophy and Kant’s thought are often misunderstood. Overall the chapter examines Sellars’ analytic appropriations of Kant in three topic-areas of significant current philosophical debate: (1) conceptual analysis and the structure of human knowledge; (2) laws of nature, the causal modalities, and the pragmatic or relative a priori; and (3) the disputes concerning Kant and nonconceptual content.

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 the human being in the world. Sellars’s distinctive contribution to this longstanding (if currently on the defensive) metaconceptual approach to the nature of ontological categories was to interpret and reconstruct it in terms of his own ‘meaning as use’ or norm-governed inferential role semantics. With these resources Sellars sought to preserve the genuine insights in the ‘realist’ or broadly platonic traditions while simultaneously defending the idea that in the end, as he puts it, “a naturalistic ontology must be a nominalistic ontology” (1980a NAO IV §129).

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 of an empirical realism in roughly Kant’s sense, but one that is happily wed with Sellars’ scientific realism, once the latter is disentangled from two implausible commitments that made such a reconciliation seem impossible to Sellars himself.

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 conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains.

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 can plausibly handle those sorts of cases without stretching the notion of inference beyond its standard uses. Finally, it is suggested that for Sellars there were deeply naturalistic motivations for his own normative inferentialism, though the latter raises further questions as to whether this really represents, as Sellars thought, a genuinely scientific naturalist outlook on meaning and conceptual cognition.

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 expense of experience, while many analytic pragmatists themselves emphasize that Sellars’s philosophy arguably runs against the grain of pragmatism in central respects, with Brandom for instance recently remarking that “Sellars never explicitly identified himself with pragmatism.” Part I explores the classical pragmatist influences on the development of Sellars’s philosophy, with reference to aspects of the intellectual background in which those views formed. Part II then outlines more abstractly some of the enduring pragmatist themes in Sellars’s philosophy, including his conceptions of the myth of the given, the space of reasons, and his normative-inferentialist theory of meaning. I conclude in Part III with Sellars’s views on truth and “picturing,” which present a complex case for the question of “how pragmatist” Sellars’s views both were and ought to be.

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 continued to return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance.

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 reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between the ‘manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism.

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 philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant."