Abstract

Sellars discusses a wide variety of philosophical problems in his Carus Lectures, and everything he has to say about those problems deserves very careful attention. But it seems appropriate for me to confine my remarks to his first lecture, which he calls “The Lever of Archimedes.” He pays me the compliment of taking as a starting point for this lecture a paper of mine, “Coherence, Certainty, and Epistemic Priority,” published by The Journal of Philosophy in 1964. Although the paper deals with very general conceptual and epistemological issues, its orientation is influenced by the fact that it was written for a memorial symposium on the philosophy of C. I. Lewis.