Abstract

Sellars offers a twentieth-century American Hylas as the adversary to Philonous, the spokesman of the idealist position in Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Hylas is still a materialist, but espouses an evolutionary or "emergent" materialism. He challenges Philonous' assumption that matter is inert, and incapable of giving rise to novelties such as consciousness or life itself. Since Sellars finds Berkeley to be entirely logical in his argument, he tends his hand to the theory of perception. Sellars' Hylas finds Berkeley's analysis of mediate and immediate perception to be inadequate with respect to the complex operation of perceiving. He suggests "direct perception which is mediated by information." Although mediated, direct perception differs from Berkeley's 'mediate perception', as it is not inferred from sensations which were perceived first. It differs from Berkeley's 'immediate perception' in not identifying perceiving with awareness of sensation. In a short epilogue the author looks back on sixty years of American philosophy, concluding that it deviates from the European in having "a certain explanatory openness."--M. B. M.