Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision

This book brings together the work of Wilfrid Sellars with work in 20th century phenomenology and 21st century speculative realism in order to think through one of the most important predicaments of contemporary philosophy. As a result of the disenchantment of nature in late modernity, philosophy has struggled to account for the place of persons, construed as loci of normative authority and responsibility, within a scientifically, naturalistically described world, bereft of values and norms. The book argues that Sellars takes both the framework of persons and science seriously and thinks that this implies the need not just for reconciling the manifest and scientific images but for fusing them into one stereoscopic vision of reality and our place in it. One of the main aims of this book is to address the issue of the form which a non-alienated experience of ourselves-in-the-world would take in the Sellarsian cryptic stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientificimage. Through an extended discussion of Sellars’ relevance for contemporary continental philosophy and phenomenology, in which his views on perception, the commonsense ‘lifeworld’, science, normativity, personhood, morality and process metaphysics are presented and extended, the book sketches a novel view about what a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image would amount to at the level of our lifeworld experience.

"​What will philosophy look like in the future?  Dionysis Christias makes a case here that Wilfrid Sellars offers us the best path to moving philosophy into the future.  Sellars realized that the problematic of contemporary philosophy is generated, not by a metaphysical clash between two orders of being, say, mind and body (or world), or the concrete and the abstract, but by the conceptual clash between a thoroughly naturalistic descriptive framework spawned by the sciences and the norm-laden (and therefore prescriptively oriented) framework in which we conceptualize and intend our activities.  The key to resolving this clash is rejecting the Myth of the Given.  We can then properly understand the relations between these frameworks, that is, we can take science seriously while acknowledging that personhood is a normative and communal phenomenon.  This will enable us to form “a non-alienated experience of ourselves-in-the-world.”  Christias puts Sellars into fascinating dialogue with continental philosophy and its emphasis on the life-world (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Meillasoux and Deleuze), but does not infer that it is incompatible with a scientific world-view.  Philosophy in the future will be a wider-ranging conversation than was available in its immediate past, and Sellars was ahead his time.  Christias makes a strong case that his time has come." (Willem de Vries is Professor of Philosophy in the University of New Hampshire)

"Wilfrid Sellars is an anomalous figure in 20^th century philosophy: a Kantian who proclaimed both the irreducibility of the normative and the ontological primacy of science; an analyst of meaning who insisted that language does not mirror the world; a scientific realist who espoused a metaphysics of pure processes. Sellars fits into neither the analytic nor Continental traditions. In this brilliant book, Dionysis Christias shows how Sellars’ singular oeuvre harbors a hidden thread that unravels the dichotomies around which the analytic and Continental traditions constituted themselves. Christias’ starting point is the insight that Sellars’ metalinguistic expressivism and his process naturalism are not incompatible but interdependent. On this basis, Christias proposes a daring rapprochement between Sellars’ expressivism and phenomenological critique of representation. While Sellars exposes phenomenology’s reliance on the myth of the categorial given, his non-representational model of lifeworld and science points towards a post-phenomenological stereoscopy of manifest and scientific images which is at once practically and categorially transformative. But Christias goes beyond reconstruction to augment Sellars’ philosophy. He shows how to provide conditions of individuation for pure processes; how to distinguish between the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of science; and how to reconcile instrumental rationality with intrinsic purposefulness. Perhaps mostimportantly, Christias shows how Sellars provides us with the resources for reconciling collective emancipation with natural necessity. This is not only a groundbreaking contribution to Sellars scholarship but a profoundly audacious work of philosophy in its own right." (Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy in the American University of Beirut)

Dionysis Christias is Research Associate Professor at the Research Center for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens. He is also the Research Director of a 3-year funded research project entitled: The Philosophical Implications of Cognitive Neuroscience: Overcoming the Representation Wars. He received his Ph.D. from University of Athens in 2010.