Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg Edited by James R. O'Shea and Eric M. Rubenstein Introduction KANT Willem deVries, Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy David Landy, The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept LANGUAGE AND MIND William G. Lycan, Rosenberg On Proper Names Douglas Long, Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green, Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning David Rosenthal, The Mind and Its Expression (...) MIND AND KNOWLEDGE Jeffrey Sicha, The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental Bruce Aune, Rosenberg on Knowing Joseph C. Pitt, Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism Matthew Chrisman, The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg James O’Shea, Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide ONTOLOGY Anton Koch, Persons as Mirroring the World Eric M. Rubenstein, Form and Content, Substance and Stuff Ralf Stoecker, On Being a Realist About Death William G. Lycan, Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg. (shrink)

The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have been (...) championed by “right wing” Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how (1) Sellars’s Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as “bundles” or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how (2) Sellars’s modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’s own attempted via media synthesis—what I call his “Kantian scientific naturalism”—merits another look from both the left and the right. (shrink)

The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have been (...) championed by “right wing” Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how Sellars’s Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as “bundles” or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how Sellars’s modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’s own attempted via media synthesis—what I call his “ Kantian scientific naturalism”—merits another look from both the left and the right. (shrink)

This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between the ‘manifest (...) and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism. (shrink)

The overall contention of this paper, conducted through an examination of the idea of a ‘critical direct realism’ as this was developed across the twentieth century first in the thought of Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) and then in a different form by his son Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), is that such a view, in both its conceptual and sensory representational dimensions, is plausible as a form of direct realism. However, to the extent that the mediating sensory or qualitative dimension was itself (...) conceived by both thinkers in what I characterize as strongly ‘phenomenal realist’ terms, the resulting philosophical commitments were of a kind that most current direct realists would generally not accept, even in cases where they themselves are phenomenal realists (perhaps naïve realists). The various perceiver-dependent forms of that additional, perhaps detachable commitment of most critical realists is likely responsible for the assessment of William Pepperell Montague (1873–1953) and other ‘neo-realists’ that ‘critical realism’ is not really, as advertised by Roy Wood Sellars, a version of direct realism, but ultimately a retreat to indirect realism. However, I argue that in both of its primary conceptual and sensory representational commitments, ‘critical direct realism’ remains a plausible competitor to direct acquaintance versions of direct realism. (shrink)

This paper examines a lasting tension in pragmatism between broadly functionalist outlooks on meaning and a primacy placed on what can be revealed by direct experiential or practical encounters. Both the inferentialist and experiential emphases can be traced back to Peirce’s original pragmatic maxim. Here the tension is examined first in William James’s insightful views on intentionality and experience, followed by a diagnosis of the problem as it has arisen in neo­pragmatist debates concerning the nature of perceptual knowledge in (...) Rorty and Brandom and their critics. In the end the paper sketches the general form of a resolution of the tension that is consistent with both of these core emphases in the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades of the century. Beginning (...) in the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)

The mainstream of the philosophy of science in the second quarter of this century—the so-called “logical empiricist” or “logical positivist” movement—assumed that theoretical language in science is parasitic upon observation language and can be eliminated from scientific discourse by disinterpretation and formalization, or by explicit definition in or reduction to observational language. But several fashionable views now place the onus on believers in an observation language to show how such a language is meaningful in the absence of a theory.In the (...) present paper, I propose to show why logical positivism failed to do justice to the basic empirical and logical problems of philosophy of science. I also wish to consider why the drastic reaction, typified by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, fails t o provide a suitable alternative, and to suggest that the radical approaches of recent writers such as Mary Hesse and Dudley Shapere hold out a genuine promise of dealing effectively with the central tasks that face the philosopher of science today. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of (...) what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically (...) been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given, since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses –both turn out to be mistaken. (shrink)

Central to Sellars’ account of human cognition was a clear distinction, expressed in varying terminology in his different works, “between conceptual and nonconceptual representations.” Those who have come to be known as ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have tended to reject Sellars’ appeals to nonconceptual sensory representations. So-called ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ such as Ruth Millikan and Jay Rosenberg, on the other hand, have embraced and developed aspects of Sellars’ account, in particular the central underlying idea (...) that human perceptual cognition involves a certain naturalistic ‘mapping’ correspondence or structural ‘picturing’ isomorphism between internal mental representations and the layout and behavior of objects in the surrounding environment. Sellars, despite his defenses of nonconceptual representational content throughout his career, has with no small irony come to be cited as one of the “founding fathers of conceptualism.” While recognizing the strong conceptualist elements in Sellars’ Kantian account of perceptual cognition, I argue that a central core of Sellars’ account of nonconceptual sensory contents does not by itself fall afoul of the philosophical worries raised by the left-leaning Sellarsians, and that in fact it has significant merits in its own right. (shrink)

A survey of Descartes' scientific career from his student days at the Jesuit College of La Flèche to his departure for Sweden in 1649.

This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars comes at a time when Sellars's influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. A team of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars's inferentialist semantics (...) and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative 'pure process' metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between philosophers whose work continues to be inspired and informed by Sellars's thought today. (shrink)

Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge. This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship (...) to more recent debates concerning ‘theory of mind’, in particular the theory theory. A close look reveals that Sellars’ original view embodied several distinctions that would enable more recent theory theorists to accommodate certain phenomenological objections that have been raised against that outlook. At the heart of the philosophical issue is an overlooked complexity involved in Sellars’ account of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction, involving a conception of the distinction that is both independently plausible and a key to the issue in dispute. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) remains a landmark work of philosophy and one that most students will encounter at some point in their studies. At nearly seven hundred pages of detailed and complex argument it is a demanding and intimidating read. James O’Shea’s introduction to the Critique seeks to make it less so. Aimed primarily at students coming to the book for the first time, it provides step-by-step analysis in clear, unambiguous prose. The conceptual problems Kant sought to (...) resolve are outlined and his conclusions concerning the nature of human knowledge and the possibility of metaphysics, and the arguments for those conclusions, are explored. Key concepts are explained throughout and the reader is provided with an unrivalled route map through the many and varied parts of the text. In addition, O’Shea’s careful and insightful analysis offers much for more seasoned readers of Kant and his interpretation provides a significant contribution to recent work. -/- “Exhibiting both care and liveliness, the text provides what it set out to offer, namely a readable and philosophically stimulating discussion of a difficult but seminal work. The discussion is genuinely approachable and clear without diminishing the difficulty of the problems it addresses. It provides students with a very helpful basis for understanding Kant’s book.” Graham Bird, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester. (shrink)

The thought of Wilfrid Sellars has figured prominently in recent discussions of the relationship between naturalism and normativity . On the one hand, some have appealed to Sellars' philosophy in defence of the thesis that what he called the normative 'space of reasons' is in some sense sui generis and irreducible to the natural causal order described by the natural sciences. On the other hand, others have exploited equally central aspects of Sellars' philosophy in defence of the seemingly incompatible project (...) of attempting to give an exhaustive scientifically naturalist account of mind and meaning, and perhaps of the nature of normativity itself. I contend that what Sellars described as 'the Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons' ( Naturalism and Ontology ) is the key to understanding his normative and pragmatist variety of naturalism. Sellars saw himself as having articulated a detailed philosophical perspective within which the normative aspects of meaning, knowledge, truth, and representation are themselves opened up, in principle, to naturalistic explanation. (shrink)

A review of deVries' and O'Shea's books, both titled "Wilfrid Sellars". By Jaroslav Peregrin.

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

John McDowell’s recent collection of essays, _Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars_ is a penetrating work that builds upon insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars in order to articulate “an idealism that does not diverge from common-sense realism,” a view according to which “thought and the world must be understood together” (p. 143). McDowell argues that the insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars should enable us to see that certain perennial philosophical difficulties concerning how thought (...) is related to empirical reality are in fact based on mistaken, noncom- pulsory views about the nature of intentionality in general, and about the relationship between free human rationality and passive sensory intake from the world in particular. In this critical notice I first highlight some central issues that reappear throughout the essays, and then I raise some questions concerning issues both internal to McDowell’s account and in relation to the ways in which his views clash with those of Sellars in particular. (shrink)

At the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a decisive break with certain fundamental Cartesian assumptions or claims about consciousness and self-consciousness, claims that have nonetheless remained perennially tempting, from a phenomenological perspective, independently of any further questions concerning the metaphysics of mind and its place in nature. The core of this philosophical problem has recently been helpfully exposed and insightfully probed in Dan Zahavi’s book, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. In these remarks I suggest (...) that Zahavi’s view of what he calls ‘The Experiential Self’ defends precisely the sorts of claims to which a Kantian account of consciousness is fundamentally opposed, and while assessing the overall merits of the two contrasting outlooks is no easy matter, I side with the Kantian view. (shrink)

John King-Farlow's ‘The Positive McTaggart on Time’ brings out extremely important likenesses between ‘abstract’ metaphysicians and ‘concrete’ philosophers of science. These striking similarities illustrate a perennial human quest for Something More Basic than Time, a quest which characterizes not only mystics who rejoice in contradictions but hard-headed philosophers who submit to the rigours of logic. King-Farlow is largely concerned with the McTaggart of 1908 and his motivation for writing ‘The Unreality of Time’. I should like to explore further the surprising (...) bond between the Search for Something Deeper in the later McTaggart of The Nature of Existence and the writings on Time of Hans Reichenbach and Adolf Grünbaum. Reflection on this similarity should enable us better to evaluate the view that our vulgar, if practically useful, assertions about Time's Arrow must be reinterpreted by the wise in terms of chastened logical constructions out of statements about Something Deeper—logical constructions which are alleged, if chaste enough, to be eliminable. (shrink)

Each of the standard outlooks in the philosophy of perception --phenomenalism, direct realism, indirect realism, scepticism -- has thus been viewed as Hume's own considered position in the eyes of informed commentators. I argue that Hume does not ascribe univocally to any one of the traditional stances in the philosophy of perception, nor does he leave us only a schizophrenic or 'mood' scepticism. Hume attempted to resolve the traditional philosophical problem (or perhaps more accurately, to set it aside on principled (...) grounds) by transforming the issue from one of theoretical consistency to one of pragmatic coherence. Hume's moderate scepticism and his systematic naturalism entail a reflective 'return' to the vulgar (cp. T 223), a qualified normative endorsement of the directly realist beliefs of common life. The interpretive challenge is to understand the subtle nature of that endorsement, and to explain how it arises out of genuinely Humean doctrines. The account offered here attempts both to capture Hume's own considered position and to explain the attractions and shortcomings of each of the competing interpretations. After laying out the elements of Hume's account of perceptual belief (section I), I proceed to examine in some detail two recent attempts to interpret Hume as a realist (sections II-III). I contend that these revisionary accounts ascribe unHumean doctrines to Hume. The interpretation of Hume as an irreducible 'mood' sceptic or as a phenomenalist are in that respect both closer to the mark, but Hume's reflective return to the vulgar has recast the nature of the problem and leaves us with a position that is not reflected in the more traditional interpretations (section IV). (shrink)

In this article I consider how the very different but equally Sellars inspired views of Robert Brandom and Ruth Millikan serve to highlight both the deep difficulties and the prospects for a solution to what is arguably the most central problem raised by Sellars’s attempted “stereoscopic fusion” of the “manifest” and “scientific images”: namely, the question of the nature and place of norm-governed conceptual thinking within the natural world. I distinguish two “stereoscopic tasks”: (1) the possibility of integrating a naturalistic (...) theory of animal representation within an irreducibly normative inferentialist account of conceptual content; and (2) the possibility of providing a naturalistic explanation of the normative “space of reasons” and conceptual thinking as such. Millikan embraces and Brandom resists the naturalistic representationalist hypotheses involved in (1); while Brandom embraces and Millikan resists the conception of pragmatically irreducible normativity involved in (2). The grounds of resistance in each case are arguably suspect. (shrink)

Kant's monumental book the Critique of Pure Reason was arguably the most conceptually revolutionary work in the history of philosophy and its impact continues to be felt throughout philosophical debates today. However, it is a notoriously difficult work whose basic meaning and lasting philosophical significance are both subject to ongoing controversy. In this Critical Guide, an international team of leading Kant scholars addresses the challenges, clarifying Kant's basic terms and arguments and engaging with the debates that surround this central text. (...) Providing compact explanations along with cutting-edge interpretations of nearly all of the main themes and arguments in Kant's Critique, this volume provides well-balanced arguments on such controversial topics as the interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism, conceptualism and non-conceptual content in perception, and the soundness of his transcendental arguments. This volume will engage readers of Kant at all levels. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen increased attention to the empirical and naturalistic dimensions of Kant’s philosophy, across both his theoretical and practical philosophy. Anik Waldow’s impressively wide...

In the beginning, as they say, was the ‘pragmatic maxim’ of Peirce and James. Peirce’s early formulation of the maxim in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” ran as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (Peirce 1878: 132; cf. Bernstein 2010: 2-3; and O’Shea 2008: 208-13) At its core, pragmatism thus originated as (...) a method for... (shrink)

(2010). Introduction: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 18, Naturalism, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons, pp. 313-315. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2010.494434.

At the center of both Humean and Kantian experience is a connection between the objectivity of perception and the concept of substantial identity. In the course of examining both systems as responses to structurally similar problems of perceptual objectivity, I argue that Kant's conception of substantial persistence is superior to Hume's account of the idea of identity. ;There are deep tensions in Hume's account of perception that are partially explicable in terms of his complex and naturalistic 'moderate scepticism' and the (...) conflict in the faculties of causal reasoning and imagination upon which it rests. Despite the subtlety of his explanatory scepticism, however, there remains a damaging vacillation in Hume between perceptible phenomena understood as the objects of 'vulgar' direct realism on the one hand, and as the subjective images of the causal-representationalist philosophy on the other. There are also difficulties with Hume's idea of perfect identity, the foundation of both the vulgar and philosophical systems of belief in body. Starting from an assumption of radical perceptual diversity, Hume unsuccessfully attempts to build an idea of substantial identity upon the fiction of a duration without change. ;The tension in Hume concerning the direct objects of perception is paralleled by the subjective/objective ambiguity of Kant's perceptual content terms. In Kant, however, the ambiguity reflects a coherent account of conceptualization, perceptual judgment, and self-conscious temporal experience. I examine Kant's arguments for the persistence and absolute permanence of substance and show that they are largely successful if premises are supplied from the general account of objective judgment and the unity of consciousness. ;Hume's theory of perceptual belief is ingenious but ultimately unsatisfactory according to his own criteria. His failure to construct an idea of identity upon a fictitious duration casts favorable light on Kant's contention that substantial identity is a condition on having any cognition of duration. The two philosophers' dispute concerning identity is conceptually connected to their differing treatments of the 'given' element in perception. (shrink)