9 found
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  1. Sellars, Price, and the Myth of the Given.Michael R. Hicks - 2020 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (7).
    Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars's argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars's 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars's teacher at Oxford and the only classical (...)
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    Wilfrid Sellars and the task of philosophy.Michael R. Hicks - 2021 - Synthese 198 (10):9373-9400.
    Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On this (...)
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  3. Pretense and fiction-directed thought.Michael R. Hicks - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (6):1549-1573.
    Thought about fictional characters is special, and needs to be distinguished from ordinary world-directed thought. On my interpretation, Kendall Walton and Gareth Evans have tried to show how this serious fiction-directed thought can arise from engagement with a kind of pretending. Many criticisms of their account have focused on the methodological presupposition, that fiction-directed thought is the appropriate explanandum. In the first part of this paper, I defend the methodological claim, and thus the existence of the problem to which pretense (...)
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  4.  62
    The Presentational Use of Descriptions.Michael R. Hicks - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (4):361-384.
    Discussing Keith Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, Gareth Evans considered a speaker he found it natural to describe as having “given expression to” a singular thought, though he insisted she was not referring to the person she has in mind. On accounts otherwise similar to Evans's, to express a singular thought just is to refer. Thus, as he does not explain why this speaker might speak this way, it is tempting to ignore this as a slip. (...)
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  5. Idealism, quietism, conceptual change: Sellars and McDowell on the knowability of the world.Michael R. Hicks - 2022 - Giornali di Metafisica 44 (1):51-71.
    Both Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell reject Kant’s conclusion that the world is fundamentally unknowable, and on similar grounds: each invokes conceptual change, what I call the diachronic instability of a conceptual scheme. The similarities end there, though. It is important to Sellars that the world is only knowable at “the end of inquiry” – he rejects a commonsense realism like McDowell’s for its inability to fully appreciate diachronic instability. To evaluate this disagreement, I consider Timothy Williamson’s argument that the (...)
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  6.  52
    Singular mental abilities.Michael R. Hicks - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):639-660.
    Lucy O'Brien has argued that defenders of the object-dependence of singular thought should attend to mental agency. A recent trend in action theory, towards what John Maier calls ‘agentive modality’, suggests that we conceive agency in terms of the exercise of abilities, and this is how I propose to approach O'Brien's challenge. For Gareth Evans, an early defender of object-dependence, maintained that thinking is the exercise of a complex of abilities. The debate about object-dependence gives way to the question whether (...)
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    Connotation and Frege's Semantic Dualism.Michael R. Hicks - 2019 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 36 (4):377-398.
    The traditional distinction between Millian and Fregean theories of names presupposes that what Mill calls ‘connotation’ lines up with what Frege calls ‘sense.’ This presupposition is false. Mill’s talk of connotation is an attempt to bring into view the line of thought that crystallizes in Frege’s distinction between concept and object. This latter is the semantic dualism of my title.
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  8.  42
    Moral Motivation: the Practical Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. [REVIEW]Michael R. Hicks - 2023 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (5):718-729.
    1. In the preface to his magnum opus, Science and Metaphysics, Wilfrid Sellars describes the final chapter on ‘objectivity and intersubjectivity in ethics’ as ‘the keystone of the argument,’ becaus...
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    Sellars's Transcendental Philosophy. [REVIEW]Michael R. Hicks - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (5):537-547.
    Luz Seiberth's interpretation of Sellars as a transcendental philosopher promises to change the way we read Sellars. Nonetheless, I dispute two of his central claims: that by depicting ”picturing” as as a transcendental imposition we can see it as addressing a ”vertical” constraint that Kant does not detect; and that Sellars's transcendental philosophy commits him to a Kantian ”necessitarianism” about categorical strucure. Ultimately, I conclude, Seiberth's focus on Sellars's relationship to Kant in particular distorts his understanding of Sellars's peculiar version (...)
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