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.

This essay is a response to Patrick Reider’s essay “Sellars on Perception, Science and Realism: A Critical Response.” Reider is correct that Sellars’s realism is in tension with his generally Kantian approach to issues of knowledge and mind, but I do not think Reider’s analysis correctly locates the sources of that tension or how Sellars himself hoped to be able to resolve it. Reider’s own account of idealism and the reasons supporting it are rooted in the epistemological tradition that informed the British empiricists, rather than in the metaphysical reasons that ruled within the German tradition from Leibniz through Hegel that has much more in common with Sellars’s position. Thus, Reider takes Sellars’s notion of picturing to be just another version of the representationalism that has dominated the Anglo-American tradition since Locke, whereas, in my view, because picturing is a non-semantical relation, it is an important ingredient in naturalizing the coherentist theories of the idealists.

Wilfrid Sellars has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century". He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". However, while many philosophers have begun to acknowledge Sellars's inspiration in their work, their interpretation of his thought has not always been the most accurate. His writings are difficult. Individually, his essays are complex and sometimes rely on doctrines and arguments he put forward elsewhere. Each of his articles is deepened and strengthened by seeing it in its systematic context, but he never wrote a unified exposition of his system, which therefore has to be pieced together from numerous disparate sources. Willem deVries addresses these difficulties specifically and provides a careful reading and remarkable overview of Sellars's systematic philosophy that will become the standard point of reference for all philosophers seeking to understand Sellars's hugely significant body of work.

The "Transcendental Deduction" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the great mirrors of philosophy. By that I mean that there seems to be no steady and unchanging image to be found in that text; each philosopher who approaches it finds in it a reflection of his or her own deepest concerns. Jay Rosenberg's new book, "Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason" is no exception. Rosenberg lays out a different approach to the central argument of the first Critique from those found in other commentaries. I want to bring out some of the central features of that approach, some of its history, and, finally, raise some questions about how closely his approach might come to Kant's own intentions.

I argue that John McDowell’s attempt to refute Wilfrid Sellars’s two-component analysis of perceptual experience and substitute for it a conception according to which perceptual experience is the “conceptual shaping of sensory consciousness” fails. McDowell does not recognize the subtle dialectic in Sellars’s thought between transcendental and empirical considerations in favor of a substantive conception of sense impressions, and McDowell’s own proposal seems to empty the notion of sensory consciousness of any real significance.

Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic. There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committed to the array of apparently non-natural entities or relations mentioned in the metalanguage. However, there is an underlying relation between language and world presupposed by all empirically meaningful language. In his early work Sellars sought to describe this relation in linguistic terms as a form of 'pure description', but inadequacies in that notion drove him towards the naturalistic relation between language and world that he came to call 'picturing'

This paper investigates Sellars's complex attitude towards idealism. It distinguishes between the epistemologically-based arguments that led many empiricists to idealism and a different set of more purely metaphysical arguments that came to dominate in German Idealism. Sellars resolutely rejects all of the epistemological arguments for idealism, but shows much greater sympathy with the metaphysical arguments. It is then argued that Sellars introduced his notion of picturing to avoid falling into such an idealism.