The following books have been received and many of them are still available for review. Interested reviewers please contact the reviews editor: [email protected], M., The Figure of This World:...

Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.

As neither a classical naturalist nor a non-naturalist, Merleau-Ponty appears to be a moderate or liberal naturalist. But can a phenomenologist really be a naturalist, even a liberal one? A lot hinges on how we tease this out, both as to whether it is plausible to claim Merleau-Ponty as a liberal naturalist (I argue it is), and as to whether it is an attractive and coherent position. Indeed, despite its important challenges to orthodox naturalism, there are arguably two traps to (...) avoid. If it becomes too liberal, we get: dualism or an ontological pluralism that is difficult to distinguish from a constructivism; or, in seeking to sidestep that metaphysical dilemma, there is sometimes an insistence on an overly neat methodological separation between description/understanding and explanation that is belied in practice (both scientific and philosophical). It is doubtful that such positions can legitimately claim to be naturalist in orientation, liberal or not. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy avoids these traps, however, and it is thus a useful resource for contemporary work trying to navigate between scientific naturalism and non-naturalism. (shrink)

While Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy is often depicted in an ahistorical fashion, this book explores the consequences of placing his work in its historical context. In order to show how Sellars’ early publications depend on contextual factors, Peter Olen reconstructs the conceptions of language, psychological, and social explanation that dominated American philosophy in the early 20th century. Because of Sellars’ differing explanations of language and behaviour, Olen argues that many of Sellars’ early commitments are incompatible with his later works. In the (...) course of doing so, Olen highlights problematic tensions between Sellars’ early and later conceptions of language, meta-philosophy, and normativity. Supplementing the main text is a collection of previously unpublished archival material from Wilfrid Sellars, Gustav Bergmann, Everett Hall, and other early 20th century philosophers. This text will be a useful resource to those with an interest in the history of American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy, and the myriad issues surrounding normativity and language. (shrink)

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Jay Garfield’s accounts of the self, consciousness, and phenomenology in his book, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. I argue that Garfield’s views on these topics are shaped, in problematic ways, by views he takes over from Wilfrid Sellars and applies to Buddhist philosophy.

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

Christia (2015) argues that my criticism of Sellars -- that for Sellars, all intentionality is what I call "discursive intentionality" -- relies on a misunderstanding of Sellarsian intuitions (see Sachs 2014). Here I respond to Christias by pointing that that while is correct that Sellars has a distinction between full-blown linguistic intentionality and perceptual takings, Sellars's theory of perceptual takings cannot do justice to the figure/ground structure of embodied perception stressed by Merleau-Ponty.

This precise provides an synopsis of my book "Intentionality and the Myths of the Given" (Routledge 2014). I describe the problem of intentionality in terms of the need to (1) do justice to both discursive intentionality (the intentionality of 'sapient' thought and talk) and somatic or bodily intentionality while also (2) avoiding the various Myths of the Given, including the epistemic and semantic Myths. I locate an early version to accomplish this project in C. I. Lewis. The argument shows why (...) Lewis's project fails and that a better account can be found in reconciling insights from Sellars and from Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2018, Page 119-124.

ABSTRACTHere, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from th...

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)

Although commonly cited as one of the philosophers responsible for the resurgence of interest in pragmatism, Wilfrid Sellars was also the son of Roy Wood Sellars, one of the most dedicated critical realists of the early 20th century. Given his father’s realism and his own ‘scientific realism,’ one might assume that the history of realism – and, despite contemporary interest, not pragmatism – would best serve as the historical background for Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy. I argue that Wilfrid Sellars, far from (...) being the adherent to classical pragmatism assumed by some, holds more in common with critical realism - specifically, a realism that was framed in opposition to pragmatism – than one finds amongst the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, or John Dewey. I support this claim by examining Wilfrid Sellars’ adoption of his father’s criticisms of C.I. Lewis, and offer various arguments and historical considerations against thematic accounts that insist on a strong connection between Wilfrid Sellars and pragmatism. (shrink)

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 (...) datum theorist to receive substantive comment in EPM. Timm Triplett has claimed that Sellars's discussion simply begs the question against Price, but this depends on the mistaken assumption that Sellars's concern is with foundationalism. On the contrary, Sellars's argument concerns the assumption that the innate capacity for sensory experience counts as "thinking in presence" in the way needed for empiricist accounts of content acquisition. Price's distinction between noticing universals and being aware of them encapsulates the tensions empiricists face here. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

According to Hutto and Satne, 521–536, 2015), an “essential tension” plagues contemporary neo-Pragmatist accounts of mental contents: their explanation of the emergence and constitution of intentional mental contents is circular. After identifying the problem, they also propose a solution: what neo-Pragmatists need to do, to overcome circularity, is to appeal to a primitive content-free variety of intentionality, different from the full-blown intentionality of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I will argue that, in addition to the problem of circularity, there is (...) another important problem that both neo-Pragmatist accounts, and Hutto and Satnes’s refinement of them, should also deal with: their difficulty to accommodate a host of recent empirical evidence and theoretical developments on the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. I will call this difficulty the objection from animal minds, and I will present several arguments designed to show that, even though the notion of primitive intentionality, introduced by Hutto and Satne, may be useful to account for some of the most basic ways of dealing with the environment of nonhuman animals, it falls short of providing an adequate explanation of the full-range of cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions that many animal species display. Thus, their proposal ends up being insufficient to help neo-Pragmatist approaches to overcome the problem of animal minds. Finally, I will suggest that overcoming this objection requires attributing to non-human animals some basic, yet content involving, kinds of intentional mental states. (shrink)

This paper explores Sellars’ and Hegel’s treatment of ‘sensation’ – a notion that plays a central role in the reflections of both authors but which has garnered little scholarly attention. To disentangle the issues surrounding the notion and elaborate its role, function, and fate in their thought, I begin with a methodological question: what kind of philosophical argument leads Sellars and Hegel to introduce the concept of ‘sensation’ into their systems? Distinguishing between their two argumentative approaches, I maintain that Hegel (...) offers what I broadly label a ‘transcendental’ argument for ‘sensation,’ which he presents in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the corresponding Lectures, whereas Sellars introduces the notion of sensation for what I term empirically ‘explanatory’ reasons. Next, I closely analyze Hegel’s and Sellars’ theories of sensation to produce a textually supported and conceptually coherent reading of their views on the notion. To clarify my methodological distinction and its stakes in Hegel’s and Sellars’ I will reference Lewis’ notion of the given. (shrink)

In this article, we will attempt to understand Sellars’ puzzling notion of ‘adequate picturing’ and its relation to the Sellarsian ‘conceptual order’ through Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge. First, it will be suggested that there are important structural similarities between Sellarsian ‘adequate picturing’ and Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge which can illuminate some ‘dark’ and not so well understood features of Sellarsian picturing. However, there remain some deep differences between Sellars’ and Spinoza’s philosophy, especially with regard to their notion of ‘adequacy’ and the sense (...) in which an idea can be said to ‘correspond’ with its object. As a consequence of those differences it turns out that, from a Sellarsian viewpoint, Spinoza’s notion of intuitive knowledge is a version of the myth of the Given. However, Sellars’ own proposed way out of the Myth has problematic consequences by Sellars’ own lights: His sharp distinction between the ‘space of reasons’ level and the level of picturing makes the Sellarsian vision of the ‘stereoscopic fusion’ of those levels virtually unintelligible. Finally, it will be argued that a non-standard interpretation of Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge -proposed in Baltas -, combined with a Sellars-inspired bifurcated understanding of Dreyfusian expert knowledge, can provide the means 1) for constructing a notion of intuitive knowledge that evades the myth of the Given, and, 2) for making full sense of the claim that the ‘space of reasons’ dimension of understanding the world can in principle be fused with the ‘picturing’ dimension and provide us with a single complex coherent experience of reality and our place in it. (shrink)

In a recent article Sachs suggests that the concept of somatic intentionality is the key to understanding how the conceptual order is externally constrained by something outside itself which is nonetheless fully intentional in nature. Sachs claims that his proposal fares better than Sellars’ view on the issue of how our experience can so much as be about objective reality. In this paper, I shall argue that this is not the case because Sellars’ view is in crucial respects misdescribed. Sachs (...) suggests that Sellars’ view is problematic because 1) conceptual intentionality cannot objectively constrain the conceptual order due to its essential discursive form, and 2) a non-intentional consciousness cannot provide an objective worldly constraint on conceptual intentionality because it is not world-directed. However neither of these points succeeds in capturing Sellars’ actual position. Further I will suggest the deepest problem which phenomenological views of a Merleau-Pontyan stripe face in the.. (shrink)

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference (...) to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. (shrink)

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a (...) priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted. (shrink)

In this broad interview Robert Brandom talks about many themes concerning his work and about his career and education. Brandom reconstructs the main debts that he owes to colleagues and teachers, especially Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, and David Lewis, and talks about the projects he’s currently working on. He also talks about contemporary and classical pragmatism, and of the importance of classical thinkers like Kant and Hegel for contemporary debates. Other themes go deeper into the principal topics of his theoretical (...) work – in particular, his later understanding of expressivism, his take on the debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists in semantics, the main open problems for his wide inferentialist project, and his methodological preference for the normative vocabulary in his account of discursive practice. Finally, Brandom touches on the epistemic role of perception and on his views about the importance of the phenomenological aspects of perceptual experience. (shrink)

I argue that Richard Rorty was mistaken to argue that Sellars's commitment to picturing undermined his commitment to pragmatism. Instead, I argue that Sellarsian picturing, correctly interpreted, is itself continuous with pragmatism's emphasis on organism-environment interaction. I trace the origins of Rorty's misunderstanding of picturing to his misunderstanding of Kant, and hence to a misunderstanding of what it would mean to naturalize Kant.

The chief aim of this thesis is mobilizing parts of the work of Wilfrid Sellars in order to reconsider the notion of medium in relation to the ones of language and thought and, per extension, conception and mind. Indeed, the account of the notion of medium is constructed as a generalization of the case of language, as described in its rapport with thought, in Sellarsian philosophy. The thesis tries to position the medium as a pivot point of articulation between epistemology (...) and ontology, mostly by using as a blue-print the Sellarsian articulation of the two through the Manifest and Scientific Images. We consider Sellars’ project of accounting for the normative character of language independently from conception, with his dismissal of the instrumentalist-dualist reading of the relation between language and thought as well as the purely materialist reading of the same. We then introduce the notion of thought as inner mental episodes with a treatment of the methods of postulation and observation. This finally leads us to zeroing in on the notion of medium qua an extension of the notion of language as presented up to this point, taking move from the thesis that Johanna Seibt draws out of Sellars’ work that language is the medium of conception rather than its expression. Finally, we articulate three chief characteristics of the notion of medium: synthetic function, actuality and observational capacity, each referring to terminology introduced in the course of the thesis. In the process of introducing the three features, we also face three preoccupations underlying the research from the beginning: the question of translatability or specificity of a medium, the problem of communication and the notion of empirical truth. Especially this latter point will lead us to the sketching of a natural-history of mediums based on the notion of medium-series. (shrink)