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1346American Philosophy in the Twentieth CenturyIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 204. 2008.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
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843'William James on Percepts, Concepts, and the Function of Cognition'In Alexander Mugar Klein (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of William James, Oxford University Press. 2018.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
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710How Pragmatist was Sellars? Reflections on an Analytic PragmatismIn Stefan Brandt & Anke Breunig (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2020.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
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506‘Psychological Nominalism’ and the Given, from Abstract Entities to Animal MindsIn 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
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483Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy: The ‘Analytic’ TraditionIn 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
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460Hume's reflective return to the vulgarBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (2). 1996.Each of the standard outlooks in the philosophy of perception --phenomenalism, direct realism, indirect realism, scepticism -- has thus been viewed as Hume's own considered position in the eyes of informed commentators. I argue that Hume does not ascribe univocally to any one of the traditional stances in the philosophy of perception, nor does he leave us only a schizophrenic or 'mood' scepticism. Hume attempted to resolve the traditional philosophical problem (or perhaps more accurately, to se…Read more
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424Sellars's Interpretive Variations on Kant's Transcendental Idealist ThemesIn Luca Corti & Antonio Nunziante (eds.), Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 79-96. 2018.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
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422Sellars' Exam Question Trilemma - Are Kant's Premises Analytic, or Synthetic A Priori, or A PosteriorBritish 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
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380On Sellars’s Analytic-Kantian Conception of Categories as Classifying Conceptual RolesIn Javier Cumpa (ed.), Categorial Ontologies: From Realism to Eliminativism, Routledge. forthcoming.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
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374Kantian Reflections on the Givenness of Zahavi’s Minimal Experiential SelfInternational 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
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352The Analytic Pragmatist Conception of the A Priori: C. I. Lewis and Wilfrid SellarsIn Sarin Marchetti & Maria Baghramian (eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide, Routledge. 2017.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
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333‘Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide’In James R. O'Shea & Eric Rubenstein (eds.), Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg, Ridgeview Publishing Company. 2010.Central to Sellars’ account of human cognition was a clear distinction, expressed in varying terminology in his different works, “between conceptual and nonconceptual representations.” Those who have come to be known as ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have tended to reject Sellars’ appeals to nonconceptual sensory representations. So-called ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ such as Ruth Millikan and Jay Rosenberg, on the other hand, have embraced and d…Read more
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321Inferentialism, Naturalism, and the Ought-To-Bes of Perceptual CognitionIn Ladislav Koreň Vojtěch Kolman Ondřej Beran (ed.), From Rules to Meanings: New Essays on Inferentialism, Routledge. 2018.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
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306What to Take Away from Sellars’s Kantian NaturalismIn 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
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292Concepts of Objects as Prescribing Laws: A Kantian and Pragmatist Line of ThoughtIn 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
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243‘Comments on Robert Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’In David Pereplyotchik & Deborah R. 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).
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235The 'theory theory' of mind and the aims of Sellars' original myth of JonesPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2): 175-204. 2012.Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge. This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship t…Read more
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217After Kant, Sellars, and Meillassoux: Back to Empirical Realism?In Fabio Gironi (ed.), Analytic and Continental Kantianism: The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux, Routledge. pp. 21-40. 2017.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
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215O'Shea, J. (2019) Review of Dennis Schulting, Kantian Nonconceptualism (Palgrave 2016), in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (online). (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2019.
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200Thought, Freedom, and Embodiment in Kant and SellarsIn 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
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143Having a sensible world in view: McDowell and Sellars on perceptual experiencePhilosophical Books 51 (2): 63-82. 2010.John McDowell’s recent collection of essays, _Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars_ is a penetrating work that builds upon insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars in order to articulate “an idealism that does not diverge from common-sense realism,” a view according to which “thought and the world must be understood together” (p. 143). McDowell argues that the insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars should enable us to see that certain perennial philosophical difficulties c…Read more
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140How to be a Kantian and a Naturalist about Human Knowledge: Sellars’s Middle WayJournal of Philosophical Research 36. 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
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110Normativity and Scientific Naturalism in Sellars’ ‘Janus‐Faced’ Space of ReasonsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3): 459-471. 2010.The thought of Wilfrid Sellars has figured prominently in recent discussions of the relationship between naturalism and normativity . On the one hand, some have appealed to Sellars' philosophy in defence of the thesis that what he called the normative 'space of reasons' is in some sense sui generis and irreducible to the natural causal order described by the natural sciences. On the other hand, others have exploited equally central aspects of Sellars' philosophy in defence of the seemingly incom…Read more
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108The needs of understanding: Kant on empirical laws and regulative idealsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (2). 1997.This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.
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107Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative TurnPolity. 2007.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 Se…Read more
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106What 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
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80Prospects for a Stereoscopic Vision of our Thinking Nature: On Sellars, Brandom, and MillikanHumana Mente 5 (21). 2012.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
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63Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg (edited book)Ridgeview Publishing Co.. 2010.Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg Edited by James R. O'Shea and Eric M. Rubenstein Introduction KANT Willem deVries, Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy David Landy, The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept LANGUAGE AND MIND William G. Lycan, Rosenberg On Proper Names Douglas Long, Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green, Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning David Rosen…Read more
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62On Sellars' exam question trilemma: are Kant's premises analytic, or synthetic a priori, or a posteriori?British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (2): 402-421. 2019.
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61How to Be a Kantian and a Naturalist about Human KnowledgeJournal 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
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