Willem A. DeVries

This chapter argues that the “clash” between the scientific and manifest images cannot be a stark conflict between two supposedly “complete” conceptual frameworks, as Sellars tends to portray it. Sellars’s obscure notion of picturing in fact plays an important role in Sellars’s criterion of ontological commitment, because there is no syntactic or semantic category of expression that can play the requisite role in Sellars’s view. Because we cannot effectively isolate any “purely descriptive” vocabulary in a functioning language, the relationship between the refined and powerful descriptive and explanatory resources developed in the sciences and the resources available within the manifest image that enable us to function as agents in a social world must be one of gradual and mutual accommodation, rather than wholesale replacement.

"Sellars' s argument in EPM is enormously rich, subtle, and compelling. It is also, for the uninitiated, extraordinarily dense. Willem deVries and Timm Triplett’s comprehensive commentary _Knowledge, Mind, and the Given_ provides a much needed guide. Beginning with a general overview to introduce some main themes and difficulties, deVries and Triplett take the reader step by step through the sixteen parts of the essay, providing at each stage necessary background, illuminating connections, and insightful clarifications of the main lines of argument.... deVries and Triplett have written a fine introduction to Sellars’s most important work." --Danielle Macbeth, _The Philosophical Review_.

Hegel often uses spatial metaphors to characterize what he calls “mechanical memory”. He describes it as an “abstract space” populated by “meaningless words” that co-exist in juxtaposition to each other therein. Space is the realm of the self-external, so it seems surprising that Hegel would employ such a notion at a relatively late stage in the dialectical investigation of intelligence, the realm of the internal. After establishing the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Hegel’s texts dealing with mechanical memory, this essay puts forth an interpretation of Hegel’s spatial characterization of mechanical memory that draws on the notion of a “logical space of reasons” to be found in the work of Wilfrid Sellars and the so-called “Pittsburgh Hegelians”.

Wilfrid Sellars and Donald Davidson were two of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century. This volume explores the deep similarities and differences between these two philosophers. Both Sellars and Davidson worked through the mid-to-late 20th century re-evaluation of the empiricist inheritance that shaped what became analytic philosophy, and both are critical of key elements of that picture. In the broadest terms, both philosophers challenge the solipsistic, mentalistic conception of knowledge and meaning that informs the tradition and set in its place systems of interrelated views that prioritize a holistic and social conception of mind, action, and language. At the same time, there are several differences in method and philosophical semantics that divide Sellars and Davidson. The chapters in this volume address the deep relations of Sellars's and Davidson's views on mind, language, and knowledge. They demonstrate how, despite coming from different assumptions and methodologies, Sellars and Davidson converge on a view that essentially erases the philosophy of language as a separate discipline and embeds it in the philosophy of action. Sellars and Davidson in Dialogue will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in the history of analytic philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

AT Sophist 255b7-e the Eleatic Stranger gives two arguments, one to show that being and identity are not the same, and one to show that being and otherness are not the same. Scholars have not paid them particularly close attention, but it seems generally agreed that the two arguments are quite different. In this paper I shall offer an interpretation which shows that the two arguments, though superficially quite different, are intrinsically and importantly related. Specifically, in the first argument the Stranger elicits an obvious falsehood from the hypothesis that being and identity are the same. I claim that in order to distinguish being and otherness an exactly parallel argument could have been given instead of the second argument we actually find. However, there are sound dramatic reasons why this was not done, for in this case the falsehood would not be obvious. Instead, the argument we are given takes us deeper and analyzes the source of the falsehood by introducing a distinction between absolute and relative uses of"being."

Pragmatism has ties to Idealism; it has even been accused of being a form of idealism. I tell a story about the changing nature of idealism that makes sense of its relationship to pragmatism without threatening to collapse the two. My story is a genealogy that begins well before pragmatism shows up. Pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism underwent an evolution transforming it into something primed to influence and maybe bleed into pragmatism. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought.

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do “hang together.” Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but so are the resonances.

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 presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.' In the ensuing dialogue, TT argues that it sets the bar too high when knowledge about perceptual conditions is required for ordinary observational knowledge - that young children, for example, are implausibly excluded as knowers given Sellars's principle. WdeV defends Sellars's metaknowledge requirement against these charges. Results from developmental psychology are surveyed for what they show about the actual capabilities of young children. The implications of these results for the success of Sellars's principle are debated.

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 claiming descent from Sellars, Brandom defends here a version of modal realism and tries hard to limit Sellarsian nominalism, all in the service of elaborating Brandom’s own version of pragmatism. The range of issues Brandom addresses defies adequate consideration in a critical notice, so I confine myself here to a single issue: What is..

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 sentient creatures together with sets built up out of such entities”.