Abstract
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.
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Notes
It is also worth noting that Sellars would not think that rational connections among concepts are always analytic or a priori. Sellars makes room for material connections that are nonetheless rational. In general, Sellars thinks of rational connections, not on the containment model that Kant employed, but as inference tickets, and then recognizes both formally and materially valid inferences.
It is also worth remarking here that Sellars’s phrase “the intelligible order” implies a unique referent. But if the intelligible order is the set of rational connections among concepts, then there will be, of course, many possible intelligible orders, since there are multiple possible conceptual frameworks. Sellars does seem to assume that we can sensibly posit a Peircean ideal framework that, given world enough and time, we would be fated to accept.
This is overly simple. Sellars also mentions the “original image,” a forebear of the manifest image. Nor does Sellars think that the manifest image is itself unchanging.
It is notable that attacking the absoluteness of familiar philosophical distinctions is a standard move for pragmatists.
I argue for this interpretation of Hegel in deVries (1988, Chapter 3).
See my discussion of the status of space and time in Hegel in deVries (1988: 111–116).
Let me note here that I have found Sally Sedgwick’s (2012) analysis very helpful.
References
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deVries, W.A. Hegelian Spirits in Sellarsian bottles. Philos Stud 174, 1643–1654 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0830-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0830-0