Wilfrid Sellars E-Book

James O'Shea

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 563

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work.

The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to Karina

Copyright © James R. O'Shea 2007

The right of James R. O'Shea to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3002-1

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3003-8 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-15095-0086-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-15095-0085-7 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction

M. J. Cain, Fodor: Language, Mind and Philosophy

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction

Andreas Due, Deleuze

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and our Self-Conception

Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson

Chris Fleming, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction

Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations

Karen Green, Dummett: Philosophy of Language

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary

Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship

Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience and Reality

Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics

Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Sarah Kay, ZiZek: A Critical Introduction

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics

James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics

Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction

Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Harold W. Noonan, Frege: A Critical Introduction

James O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric

John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason

James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State

Preface

Two decades after his death Wilfrid Sellars has once again become a much discussed philosopher on the contemporary analytic philosophical scene. Accordingly there is no apology needed for the present attempt to lay out clearly and to evaluate his overall views, especially since his writings present quite a challenge for the reader who is not already acquainted with his work. I have attempted to make Sellars' arguments accessible to upper undergraduate students in philosophy. Given the complexity of Sellars' views, however, I am reminded of the late Peter Strawson's remark in the Preface to his book Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy: “The book, then, may fairly be described as introductory. But though it is introductory, it is not elementary. There is no such thing as elementary philosophy. There is no shallow end to the philosophical pool” (Strawson 1992: vii). I have put a premium on attempting to produce a readable, gradually developing, and interconnected Sellarsian story, while also noting the main points at which Sellars' views are open to criticism. Given this purpose I have not been able to engage in extensive or detailed examination of the secondary literature, although the reader will find appropriate orientation in relation to those debates as well.

I can warmly recommend to the interested reader another introductory book on Sellars that has recently appeared: Willem A. deVries' Wilfrid Sellars (2005). Those who know deVries' work know that he is a sure hand in relation to the interpretation of Sellars. The reader will find differences of substance and style between our two books, but mostly, I believe, in a manner which renders them usefully complementary guides to Sellars' philosophy. Although I completed a full draft of the present manuscript before consulting deVries' book, throughout the process I have benefited from our email exchanges and from his encouragement of the present work, for which I thank him.

For bibliographical information, secondary sources, and other useful material, all students of Sellars are indebted to the ‘Problems from Wilfrid Sellars’ website maintained by Andrew Chrucky (http://www.ditext.com/sellars/index.html). Among the most useful items on that website is Jay F. Rosenberg's (1990) Nachruf for Sellars, ‘Fusing the Images’ (also available in Rosenberg forthcoming), an excellent brief overview of Sellars' philosophy. Another very useful secondary source on Sellars is Delaney et al. (1977), listed in the bibliography. Aune (1967) is also still well worth a look for clear Sellars-inspired investigations of a wide range of topics. Finally, a wealth of primary sources relating to Sellars is currently being made available by the helpful people at the Sellars Archive in the University of Pittsburgh Archives of Scientific Philosophy.

I am indebted to the anonymous readers for Polity Press in relation to both my initial book proposal and the final manuscript. I particularly welcome the opportunity to thank Emma Hutchinson and Justin Dyer for their incredibly helpful editorial work and their constant support as the manuscript worked its way to completion. I am also grateful to friends, students, and colleagues who have read various portions of the manuscript: in particular John Callanan, Paul Coates, Jim Levine, John O'Reilly, Vasilis Politis, Jack Ritchie, and all the energetic participants of my graduate seminar on Sellars at University College Dublin (UCD). I am grateful for the continual support of my colleagues in the School of Philosophy at UCD, and also to UCD and the School of Philosophy for granting me time off from teaching during the academic year 2003–4.

Special thanks go to Jeffrey Sicha, a well-known Sellars scholar and the publisher of Sellars' main works (Ridgeview Publishing Company: http://www.ridgeviewpublishing.com). Although I have not met Jeff in person, he kindly read the entire manuscript in its final stages and offered many helpful critical comments. I have found the community of philosophers interested in Sellars to be an extraordinarily helpful group of people in general, and this has helped to make the research for this book a pleasure.

By far my greatest philosophical debt is to Jay F. Rosenberg. Over a decade ago Rosenberg was my Ph.D. supervisor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he is himself one of the best-known former Ph.D. students of Wilfrid Sellars. Rosenberg is a systematic Sellarsian and Kantian philosopher who has also rightly earned the reputation among Sellarsians as the philosopher who is most able to render right versions and to offer insightful extensions of Sellars' philosophy. I highly recommend all of Rosenberg's works listed in the bibliography to the reader who is interested in pursuing a more in-depth study of Sellars' philosophy. A new collection of Rosenberg's articles on Sellars, Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. My thanks to Jay for first introducing me to both Sellars and Kant, and for his detailed comments on drafts of chapters for the present work.

On both the philosophical and the personal sides of life I have had such extraordinary support and benefited from so many insights from my wife, Dr. Karina Halley, that I cannot imagine what it would have been like to take on this task without her strong encouragement all along the way. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you sacrificed for me during the times when I allowed the work for this book to take over just about everything else.

Acknowledgments

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for their permission to reproduce material in this book: Ridgeview Publishing Company, for quotations from Naturalism and Ontology (1997) and Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1992); University of Pittsburgh Press, for quotations from ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,’ in Robert Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (1962); University of Minnesota Press, for quotations from ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (eds), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1 (1956); and The Monist, for quotations from ‘Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process’ (1981). (Copyright © 1981 THE MONIST: An International Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, Peru, Illinois USA 61354.) Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Introduction

There is increasing recognition today that Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89) was one of the most important philosophers in America during the twentieth century. In fact Robert Brandom has recently described Sellars as “the greatest American philosopher since Charles Sanders Peirce. He is the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the 20th century” (Brandom 2000b). This introduction will provide a first glance at some of the ideas for which Sellars is best known, followed by a very brief philosophical biography. The substantive issues to be explored in the rest of the book will be introduced more fully in chapter 1.

Sellars is perhaps best known for his attack on what he called the myth of the given, as laid out in 1956 in his most important work, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM).1 It was traditionally (and Sellars thinks mistakenly) argued that since not all of our knowledge can be derived by inference from prior knowledge ad infinitum, there must be some basic items of knowledge which are simply ‘given’ in roughly the sense that they are (allegedly) known directly or immediately without presupposing our possession of any other knowledge. Such presuppositionless knowledge would constitute the given element in our knowledge, the rest of our knowledge being built upon that foundation. Different conceptions of the given have been proposed by philosophers working within the assumptions of this basic foundationalist structure (although we shall see in chapter 5 that there are also non-foundationalist versions of the given). Empiricists such as John Locke held that the data of immediate sensory experience and introspection are among the items that constitute these fundamental starting points for knowledge; while traditional rationalists and classical metaphysicians such as René Descartes have held that certain primary principles of reason or intellect are the self-evident ‘givens’ on which rests the superstructure of our knowledge.

Sellars' EPM launched a powerful attack on the entire “framework of givenness” that he argues is shared by all foundationalist approaches to the structure of our knowledge. His most prominent criticisms in EPM helped to bring about the demise in particular of influential empiricist sense-datum epistemologies at mid-century, but his general critique of the whole idea of the given remains at the center of much discussion in epistemology today. In place of foundationalism Sellars offered an account of our knowledge as characterized by holism and fallibilism: it is the whole structure of a conceptual scheme that ultimately meets the test of experience, and any belief or presupposition, whether it is an intellectual ‘first principle’ or a ‘direct empirical observation’, is open to rejection and replacement if an alternative conception and better explanation presents itself.

This is closely related to what has been called Sellars' explanationist epistemology: his emphasis on the role of ‘inference to the best explanation’ as the primary source of epistemic justification, whether such explanatory inferences are explicitly proposed in scientific theories or only implicitly available in our reason-giving practices in everyday life. On Sellars' holistic account of our knowledge, as he puts it in the following well-known passage, “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (EPM VIII.36). We shall explore Sellars' famous views on the myth of the given and the logical space of reasons in detail in chapter 5, although the argument there will be seen also to depend in part upon his ‘inferentialist’ conception of meaning and his ‘functional role’ account of conceptual thinking as developed in chapters 3 and 4.2

The reason the rejection of the idea of the given was so important to Sellars is that it forms a crucial part of his overall approach to resolving the most fundamental problem that he argues confronts the contemporary philosopher. As Sellars conceives it, this task is to successfully overcome, by fusing together into one coherent “synoptic vision,” the apparent clash between what he called the manifest image and the scientific image of ‘man-in-the-world’ (PSIM, 1962).3 Like the myth of the given, Sellars' distinction between these two ‘images’ or all-comprehensive conceptions of the nature of the human being and the world has become a familiar one in contemporary philosophy, at least by name. The nature of the manifest and scientific images, the sources of their ostensible clash, and the philosophical tasks that this clash generates will be outlined in chapter 1, and the resulting set of problems will form the structure of the rest of the book.

The clash between the manifest and scientific images pertains to certain prima facie conflicts between the world as perceptibly manifest to and conceived by sophisticated common sense, in contrast to the conception of the world developed in modern scientific theories from the seventeenth century to the present. The revolution in physics represented most famously by Galileo and Newton gradually led to the triumph of the idea that all natural phenomena should in principle (if not yet in fact) be explainable in terms of physical laws governing mere matter-in-motion, without the need to resort to ‘teleological’ explanation in terms of purposes, essences, or designed goals in nature. With the subsequent chemical and Darwinian biological revolutions, along with the development of quantum and relativity physics as well as neurophysiological and cognitive research into the mind/brain, Sellars contends that it has become a regulative ideal or rational goal of the scientific enterprise that not only inanimate matter but also all living things should in principle be entirely explicable in terms of the postulated entities and laws of the various natural sciences.

As a result, however, this omnivorous scientific image of the world has continued to raise the sorts of questions that were pursued by all the early modern philosophers, most strikingly by Descartes himself and by Immanuel Kant. What is the nature of my own consciousness, of my thinking self, in the midst of all this complex atomic and subatomic matter-in-motion? How are we to imagine that conceptual thinking could be explainable in such physicalistic terms? And are the qualitative aspects of our sensory consciousness – our subjective experiences of color, for instance – also entirely explainable in terms of the swarms and fields of colorless microphysical particles that physics assures us exhaustively compose all things? How are free will, norms of rationality, intentional action, and moral responsibility possible in the purposeless world of matter described by science?

As we shall see in chapter 1, Sellars articulates his account of the clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human being in the natural world in terms of questions concerning the very possibility of these three fundamental dimensions of human experience: the nature of conceptual thinking, sensory consciousness, and rational willing. And as we shall see throughout subsequent chapters, Sellars developed often radically new ways of thinking about our own nature as sensing, thinking, knowing, valuing, and rationally active beings, which will enable us finally (or so he argues) to understand how that same human nature is also entirely and exhaustively explainable in terms of the picture of the natural world that is currently developing and is ideally projected within the scientific image. Sellars' task, then, is to envision how we could explain our own human nature naturalistically without ‘explaining it away’ altogether, in what will be characterized in this book as Sellars' naturalism with a normative turn.

We shall find that in the course of exploring and attempting to advance this overall meta-philosophical aim, Sellars originated many other conceptions that have since become highly influential notions that are vigorously debated within contemporary academic philosophy. He has correctly been credited by Daniel Dennett (1987) with being the originator during the 1950s of the subsequently dominant functionalist account of the nature of thinking (chapter 4), which Sellars built upon a conceptual role or inferentialist account of meaning along with a novel nominalist account of abstract entities (chapter 3). Yet early on Sellars simultaneously raised what has come to be known as the ‘hard problem’ of sensory consciousness as an insuperable difficulty for any such functionalist account, arguing that this problem necessitates a radically different approach to that aspect of consciousness (or so he argues; see chapters 5 and 6). Sellars also, as Ernest Sosa (2003) has recently noted, clearly anticipated already at mid-century the basic structure of the recent disputes between ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ in contemporary epistemology (chapter 5); and he defended a robust scientific realism during a time when the scene was largely dominated by logical positivists and empiricists (chapter 2). There is no doubt that Sellars was a highly original and systematic philosopher, among the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century.

So who was Wilfrid Sellars?4

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 20, 1912 to two first cousins and Canadians by birth, Helen Maud (Stalker) Sellars and Roy Wood Sellars. Soon after followed the birth of Wilfrid's sister Cecily in 1913. His father Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973), who was raised in Michigan and taught philosophy at the University of Michigan when Wilfrid was born, was a well-known founder of the critical realist movement in early twentieth-century American philosophy, as the author of Critical Realism: A Study of the Nature and Conditions of Knowledge (1916). It is worth saying a few words about the philosophy of Sellars père here at the start, since there are instructive continuities and differences between the philosophical outlooks of the father and the son.5

Roy Wood Sellars' anti-skeptical philosophy insisted that we should start from a presumption in favor of both our ordinary knowledge and our reflective scientific knowledge of the world. Critical realism is the view that, as common sense rightly insists, we do have referentially direct perceptual knowledge of the external material world as it is in itself; however, scientific and philosophical reflection also reveal that this knowledge is both causally and substantively mediated by the sensory contents that are produced in the knower by the object. The result is that philosophical accounts that ascribe experienced sensory qualities to the external objects themselves can in various crucial respects be highly misleading or mistaken regarding the true nature of our perceptual knowledge.6 Two of Roy Wood Sellars' other most important books, Evolutionary Naturalism (1922) and The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932), outline a conception of the human being as a complex ‘emergent’ product of organic evolution, engaged in a dynamic and multi-levelled cognitive, causal, and valuational relationship with its environment. With respect to the mind–body problem, Roy Wood Sellars developed what he called the double knowledge approach. We have knowledge of our biological brain-mind from the ‘inside’, as it were, in our awareness of the experienced contents of our own qualitative states of consciousness. But we know the same biological brain-mind from the ‘outside,’ scientifically, as a functionally adaptive cognitive mechanism or structure that is geared to its environment.

Roy Wood Sellars' non-reductively materialist naturalism also extended to a refreshingly frank and morally committed atheism. (Son Wilfrid would later report that “as a second generation atheist, I was completely at ease about the subject [of religion] and over the years I have taken great intellectual pleasure in exploring abstruse issues in theology in the classroom and in private discussion,” AR 281.) Sellars and many other like-minded thinkers called for a reorientation of religious values in the direction of what he called a “religious humanism,” based essentially on common moral values and the aspiration of increasing human welfare. Roy Wood Sellars was in fact the author of the first draft of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, which was signed by many leading intellectuals of the time, including Sellars' more famous philosophical contemporary, John Dewey.

Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy exhibits both obvious and not so obvious continuities with all of the above themes in his father's work. The substance of these views, however, was quite radically transformed by the son's immersion in the ‘linguistic turn’ that took place in twentieth-century philosophy, which was inspired in particular by British and European thinkers such as G. E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap. This fundamental change in philosophical method and approach was central to the development throughout the century of what came to be known as analytic philosophy, which continues to flourish as a leading style of philosophizing today.7

Already an avid and somewhat solitary reader, from the age of nine Sellars attended schools first in New England and then in Paris, where he learned French (his mother translated Célestin Bouglé's Evolution of Values in 1926). He then attended the junior high and high schools run by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating in 1929 with a strong interest in mathematics. This was followed by further studies at the Lycée Louis Le Grand while he was in Paris with his mother and sister, during which time the stock market crashed and young Sellars read “the philosophical and quasi-philosophical polemical literature which is the life blood of French intellectuals,” including a strong dose of Marxist political philosophy (AR 279). Sellars later reported that about this time it “suddenly hit me that my father was a philosopher and that I knew nothing about this dimension of his existence. […] Needless to say, I found his views congenial from the start and […] a dialogue was initiated which has continued for some forty-two years” (AR 280).

After six months at the University of Munich, where he learned German and “soon became convinced that Hitler would in one way or another gain power” (AR 280), he returned to attend the University of Michigan in 1931. At Michigan Sellars studied mathematics, economics, and philosophy, graduating two years later. He tells us that at this time his “first serious work in philosophy was in C. H. Langford's course on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Actually, it was at least as much on G. E. Moore and Cambridge Analysis as it was on the Empiricists” (AR 281). He also studied the metaphysics of time and was inclined toward a ‘substance ontology’ as opposed to an ‘event ontology’ – a position he would also later defend as the ontology of the manifest image, in contrast to the ‘absolute process’ ontology that he would eventually defend in relation to the emerging scientific image (cf. Sellars TWO, MP, and FMPP, and chapter 6 below). At Michigan Sellars also studied C. I. Lewis and C. H. Langford's Symbolic Logic, and while he was deeply impressed by the new mathematical logic of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, he was and remained “convinced that most transcriptions of philosophically interesting concepts into logical forms were wildly implausible” (AR 282). Somehow the new formal insights would have to be put to use within a more realistic account of the rich structure of human cognition and of the causal and logical ‘modalities’ (of necessity, possibility, etc.).

In 1933 Sellars went to the University of Buffalo as a graduate teaching assistant, where he received his MA with a thesis on ‘Substance, Change, and Event’ in 1934 (available on Chrucky's Sellars website). There he studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Husserl with the phenomenologist Marvin Farber, whose “combination of utter respect for the structure of Husserl's thought with the equally firm conviction that this structure could be given a naturalistic interpretation was undoubtedly a key influence on my own subsequent philosophical strategy” (AR 283). In the fall of 1934 Sellars entered Oriel College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, two years later receiving his first class honors BA (later officially an MA) in philosophy, politics, and economics.

While at Oxford Sellars was influenced in different ways by H. A. Prichard, Cook Wilson, C. D. Broad, and H. H. Price, overall in directions that led him toward realism in perceptual epistemology and toward Prichard's ‘deontological intuitionism’ in ethics. However, somehow Prichard's realist interpretation of moral obligation and the logic of ‘ought’ would have to be combined, Sellars thought, with insights from the naturalistic account of moral motivation that was emerging in the new ‘emotivism’ (AR 284–5; see chapter 7 below).

It was reflection on Kant's critical philosophy, however, that would above all continue to occupy Sellars' thinking, in particular Kant's contention “that a skeptic who grants knowledge of even the simplest fact about an event occurring in Time is, in effect, granting knowledge of the existence of nature as a whole. I was sure he was right” (AR 285). But how could one appropriate Kant's insights without sliding all the way into Kant's own ‘transcendental idealism’? “It wasn't until much later that I came to see that the solution of the puzzle lay in correctly locating the conceptual order in the causal order and correctly interpreting the causality involved” (AR 286, italics added). We shall see in every chapter of this book that questions concerning the complex relationships between reasons and causes, between the normative and the natural, were to remain at the center of Sellars' philosophical reflections.

In 1936 Sellars embarked on a D.Phil. thesis at Oxford on Kant (with T. D. Weldon), but he moved to Harvard the next year and never would end up completing a Ph.D. thesis. It might have been thought impossible to match or better the list of his teachers at Oxford, but at Harvard his teachers formed an equally impressive All-Star line-up, amongst them D. W. Prall, C. I. Lewis, R. B. Perry, C. L. Stevenson, and W. V. O. Quine. Through Quine, Sellars was introduced to the work of Rudolf Carnap, who over the next decade was to become a powerful influence on his own way of doing philosophy. In 1938 Sellars decided that he wanted to pursue ethical intuitionism as the topic for his Ph.D., until he discovered “how thoroughly and lucidly William Frankena […] had mastered it” (AR 288).

Having married his first wife Mary Sharp in 1938 (Mary died after a long illness in 1970; later his long-time companion and second wife was a former student, Susanna Felder Downie), Sellars was anxious to find employment, and his first academic appointment was at the University of Iowa in the same year. He was responsible for teaching a wide variety of history of philosophy courses and he developed expertise in ancient and medieval philosophy. Sellars and the logical positivist Herbert Feigl at Iowa shared a basic scientific naturalist philosophical outlook, but Feigl (comparable in this respect to Quine) apparently did not share Sellars' uniquely reconciliationist meta-philosophical aims. Writes Sellars of Feigl:

We hit it off immediately, although the seriousness with which I took such ideas as causal necessity, synthetic a priori knowledge, intentionality, ethical intuitionism, the problem of universals, etc., etc., must have jarred his empiricist sensibilities. Even when I made it clear that my aim was to map these structures into a naturalistic, even a materialistic metaphysics, he felt, as many have, that I was going around Robin Hood's barn [i.e., taking the long way around to the right conclusion]. (AR 290)

Sellars was also in dialogue at Iowa with Gustav Bergmann and Everett Hall, and in the intellectual neighborhood of the behavioral psychologists Kenneth Spence and Kurt Lewin.

Despite his growing reputation, Sellars had neither finished a Ph.D. nor published anything by 1943 when he applied for a commission and saw active duty in Air Combat Intelligence in the Atlantic Fleet Anti-Submarine Development Detachment at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. After the war, he and his wife Mary, who was now successfully writing short stories, resolved to write for up to ten hours every day to get Wilfrid over his writing block. Eventually in 1947 there appeared the first of what was thereafter to be a steady outpouring of deep and challenging journal articles for the remainder of his highly successful academic career.8

In 1946 Sellars had followed Feigl to the University of Minnesota, where he subsequently flourished for thirteen years: as full professor from 1951, as chair of the philosophy department from 1952 to 1959, and as a vigorous participant in the highly respected Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science founded by Feigl in 1953. Feigl and Sellars co-edited the long-standard anthology Readings in Philosophical Analysis in 1949, which was followed by Sellars and Hospers' similarly influential anthology Readings in Ethical Theory in 1952. In 1950 Feigl and Sellars co-founded Philosophical Studies, the first journal in America explicitly devoted to the new ‘analytic’ approach to philosophy. These were all significant events in the development of analytic philosophy in America.

From 1959 to 1963 Sellars was professor of philosophy in a divided department at Yale, until he was lured to the University of Pittsburgh, where he happily remained for twenty-six years until his death in 1989. Pittsburgh quickly became and has remained one of the top departments of philosophy in America.

The list of influential philosophers who either were students of Sellars or whose views he strongly influenced is very impressive indeed. Hector Neri-Castañeda (Ph.D. 1954) at Minnesota, and Jay Rosenberg (Ph.D. 1966) and Paul Churchland (Ph.D. 1969) at Pittsburgh were among those who wrote Ph.D. theses under Sellars' supervision. Sellars' philosophy plays an important role in the thought of such well-known philosophers as Bas van Fraassen, Ruth Millikan, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, John McDowell, Gilbert Harman, David Lewis, William Lycan, Robert Brandom, Patricia Churchland, Laurence Bonjour, Michael Williams, and Keith Lehrer. By all accounts Sellars was at his best in dialogue as a teacher and colleague, and he clearly made a lasting impression on his former students.

I will not attempt a chronological or thematic survey of Sellars' philosophical writings here, but will rather let their importance show through the discussions to follow. As to his personal characteristics, Sellars was apparently a rather private person who enjoyed gardening, baseball, and politics. Most of all, however, all who knew him recount how he thrived on the sort of animated dialectical philosophical discussions with students and colleagues which were, as he saw it, a participation in the same ongoing dialogue that he maintained in his writings with his historical philosophical colleagues – Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein – the dialogue which, for Sellars, constitutes philosophy itself.

Our exploration of Sellars' conception of the nature and aims of philosophy, however, begins in chapter 1.

Notes

1

    The following is an over-simplified account of ‘the given’; see

chapter 5

for the details. References to Sellars' works are given by abbreviations listed in the bibliography. In 1956 Sellars delivered three lectures at the University of London entitled ‘The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ published that same year as EPM in the first volume of the

Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science

. References to EPM in this work will be to its sixteen parts and sixty-three sections, for example ‘EPM III.17’ is part III, section 17. (Section numbers 9 and 16 were mistakenly repeated in EPM; references to these will simply cover both repeated sections.) The same ‘chapter.section’ format will be used for many of his other works as well; otherwise page references are given.EPM has recently been reprinted in its entirety with excellent section by section introductory commentaries by deVries and Triplett (2000) and Brandom (1997). These are highly recommended editions for students and scholars alike.

2

    Many students of philosophy have recently had their interest awakened in Sellars through their encounters with the constructive uses made of his views on the myth of the given and the ‘logical space of reasons’ in three highly influential books: Richard Rorty's

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(1979), Robert Brandom's

Making It Explicit

(1994), and John McDowell's

Mind and World

(1994). We shall have occasion to refer to these important works in what follows, but the aims of this book preclude the sort of detailed engagement with them that they deserve. In a paper delivered at a conference in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Sellars' delivery of EPM at University College London, entitled ‘On the Structure of Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative Turn' (O'Shea 2006b), I discuss the relationship between Sellars' own views and the works of both the above ‘left-wing’ Sellarsians and other ‘right-wing’ Sellarsians, as they have been called. (See also O'Shea 2002.)

3

    Throughout the text I shall use both ‘man-in-the-world’ (generally in single quotes) to recall Sellars' own phrase, but also various more explicitly neutral equivalents such as ‘human-being-in-the-world,’ in keeping with more recent usage.

4

    For these brief biographical remarks I have relied primarily upon Sellars' own ‘Autobiographical Reflections’ (AR). Both that article and several interesting memorials to Sellars by philosophers are available on the ‘Problems from Wilfrid Sellars’ website (see under Chrucky in the bibliography). I have also consulted the biographical accounts in deVries 2005 and Brandom 2000b. More detailed work on Sellars' life will be made possible as his collected papers at the University of Pittsburgh are currently being made available to scholars.

5

    See Wilfrid Sellars' own contribution to a symposium held in honor of his father's philosophy in 1954, entitled ‘Physical Realism’ (PR), and also ‘The Double-Knowledge Approach to the Mind–Body Problem’ (DKMB, 1971). Jaegwon Kim has recently remarked, in an incisive historical and conceptual examination of the nature of philosophical naturalism, that to “see that American naturalists held substantive doctrines in metaphysics and epistemology as constitutive of their naturalism, it is useful to go back to earlier naturalists, in particular, Roy Wood Sellars, a philosopher whose work, in my view, has been unjustly neglected” (Kim 2003: 88).

6

    For a good recent defense of critical realism from a Sellarsian perspective, see Coates forthcoming.

7

    For an overview of the period, which includes a brief comparison of the views of Roy Wood Sellars and Wilfrid Sellars in relation to wider philosophical developments, see O'Shea forthcoming, ‘American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.’

8

    Sellars' best-known collection of published articles is his

Science, Perception and Reality

(

SPR

, 1963). His important early essays were usefully collected by Jeffrey Sicha in

Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds

(

PPPW

, 1980).

Science and Metaphysics

(

SM

, 1967) and

Naturalism and Ontology

(

NAO

, 1980) were stand-alone books based primarily on the prestigious John Locke and John Dewey lecture series Sellars delivered at Oxford and Chicago, respectively. Two other major collections of his articles are

Philosophical Perspectives

(1967, later in two volumes:

PPHP

:

History of Philosophy

and

PPME

:

Metaphysics and Epistemology

), and

Essays in Philosophy and its History

(

EPH

, 1974). Apart from

EPH

, we have Jeffrey Sicha and Ridgeview Publishing Company (Atascadero, CA:

http://www.ridgeviewpublishing.com

) to thank for the currently available editions of all of these and other works by Sellars (e.g., see also

ME

,

KTM

, and

KPT

listed in the bibliography).

1The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images

There is no better entryway into Sellars' philosophical system than to begin with his reflections on what he characterized in ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (1962) as “the philosophical quest” (PSIM 1). This first chapter will include a hefty sampling of quotations from Sellars in order to convey a sense of the shape of the key problems as he characterized them. Later chapters will provide the more detailed and critical analyses.

The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientific images

In one of his most frequently quoted passages, Sellars wrote that the “aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (PSIM 1). In his 1971 Matchette lectures on ‘The Structure of Knowledge’ he put it this way:

The ideal aim of philosophizing is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act. I say ‘reflectively’, because there is a sense in which, by the sheer fact of leading an unexamined, but conventionally satisfying life, we are at home in this complexity. It is not until we have eaten the apple with which the serpent philosopher tempts us, that we begin to stumble on the familiar and to feel that haunting sense of alienation which is treasured by each new generation as its unique possession. This alienation, this gap between oneself and one's world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core; for after the first bite there is no return to innocence. There are many anodynes, but only one cure. We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize. (SK I.3)

The aim of this stage-setting chapter is to gain a sense of what Sellars means by the “alienation, this gap between oneself and one's world” that comes to light only as a result of philosophical reflection, and which he thinks “can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core”: that is, only through further sustained and systematic reflection in which “no intellectual holds are barred” (PSIM 1).

Sellars has chosen his words carefully in referring to “the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act.” As we shall see, he wants to structure the issues raised by our loss of intellectual innocence in terms of certain difficulties that stand in the way of our becoming “reflectively at home” with our understanding of our own nature as (1) passively sensing, (2) conceptually thinking, and (3) rationally active beings. Ironically, it is one of our greatest intellectual achievements in opening up the nature of reality to us – the development of the modern natural sciences since the sixteenth century – which has by its very success threatened to alienate us intellectually from that same natural world. Sellars' overarching philosophical aim is firstly to articulate the nature and sources of our loss of intellectual innocence, and then to cure our resulting sense of intellectual alienation by eating the apple to the core.

The philosopher or the philosophically inclined, according to Sellars, strives for “a reflective insight into the intellectual landscape as a whole,” attempting to grasp in one overall “synoptic vision” how it all hangs together (PSIM 2–3). Since it is clearly impossible for any thinker to competently know her way around all the different specialized fields of human knowledge, Sellars recognizes that the idea of “the synoptic vision of true philosophy” is what Kant would have called a regulative ideal of reason. We seek “to approximate to the philosophical aim” (PSIM 2–3) through a sustained ‘second-order’ reflection on the general principles, methods, and assumptions that characterize the ‘first-order’ practices and results of the various other disciplines and dimensions of human experience.

In fact, however, Sellars argues that the most important tasks facing the synoptic philosopher may be brought together in terms of two idealized conceptual frameworks that he calls the manifest image and the scientific image of ‘man-in-the-world.’ Thus he contends that there is

a crucial duality which confronts the contemporary philosopher at the very beginning of his enterprise. Here the most appropriate analogy is stereoscopic vision, where two differing perspectives on a landscape are fused into one coherent experience.

For the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world. (PSIM 4–5)

The synoptic vision aimed at by the philosopher may in this way be conceived as the achieving of a synoptic, stereoscopic fusion into one coherent picture of two global or all-comprehensive ‘images’ of the nature of the human-being-in-the-world. What we need to consider now is in what sense and why Sellars holds that this is so.

Sellars indicates that he is “using ‘image’ in this sense as a metaphor for conception” (PSIM 5). Contemporary philosophy thus has as its primary aim a comprehensive understanding of how the two different conceptual frameworks of the manifest image and the scientific image may be integrated into one coherent conception of the nature of the human person within the natural world.1 While the manifest image and the scientific image both exist concretely in the form of various actual historical conceptual practices (“as much a part and parcel of the world as this platform or the Constitution of the United States”), Sellars explains that they

are both ‘idealizations’ in something like the sense in which a frictionless body or an ideal gas is an idealization. They are designed to illuminate the inner dynamics of the development of philosophical ideas. […] The story is complicated by the fact that each image has a history, and while the main outlines of what I shall call the manifest image took shape in the mists of pre-history, the scientific image, promissory notes apart, has taken shape before our very eyes. (PSIM 5)

Sellars regarded it as an indispensable method in philosophy to attempt to construct relatively clear, ideal types or models – for example, ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’ as types of approach in the theory of knowledge – while recognizing that one will gradually need to complicate and significantly revise the initially oversimplified, tidy distinctions as the investigation proceeds to the details. The manifest and scientific images are idealized conceptual frameworks that reflect real historical intellectual developments, each framework offering a characterization of the nature of reality that may be evaluated as to its ultimate adequacy as a representation of how things really are.

In upcoming chapters we shall be examining in greater detail the complex and evolving conceptual structure of Sellars' manifest and scientific images themselves. However, in order to introduce in a general way the fundamental question of the ostensible conflict or ‘clash’ between the two images, we may begin with Sellars' characterization of the manifest image as “the conceptual framework in terms of which man experienced himself and the world long before the revolution in physics was even a twinkle in the eye of Democritus,” the ancient Greek ‘atomist’ philosopher (SK I.22). It is potentially misleading but useful for many purposes to think of the manifest image as the world of ‘common sense’ (Sellars himself often uses the two phrases interchangeably, as at SM V.64). It is misleading because Sellars intends the manifest image to include various highly sophisticated conceptual refinements that have been painstakingly articulated within what he calls the “perennial” tradition in philosophy.2 Another respect in which it is misleading simply to equate the manifest image with common sense is due to the fact that the former is conceived to include whatever observational or empirical refinements have been generated by the inductive statistical methods of the natural and social sciences. The story of the emergence and development of the manifest image would be the story of humanity's own complex and evolving intellectual history (see PSIM parts I–III, about which more in a moment).

Granting these and other important qualifications, however, it will be useful to begin by thinking of Sellars' distinction between his two global images in terms of what philosophers have often contrasted as the world as conceived by common sense in terms of manifest sense-perceptible properties – the colors and shapes (or, more generally, the ‘proper and common sensible properties’) of ordinary persisting physical objects, for example – as opposed to the often strange and colorless scientifically postulated world of swarming microphysical atoms and subatomic particles that is imperceptible to our unaided senses.3 Thus the key distinction between Sellars' idealized manifest and scientific images ultimately turns out to be the following:

There is […] one type of scientific reasoning which [the manifest image], by stipulation, does not include, namely that which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behaviour of perceptible things. […] And, indeed, what I have referred to as the ‘scientific’ image of man-in-the-world and contrasted with the ‘manifest’ image, might better be called the ‘postulational’ or ‘theoretical’ image. (PSIM 7)

In our investigation of Sellars' scientific realism in chapter 2 we shall explore in detail the nature of postulational theoretical explanation in science that is appealed to in this passage. The general idea, however, may be brought out by considering the philosophical reaction by Descartes and other early modern philosophers to the “revolution in physics” that had been initiated by Galileo and other ‘natural philosophers’ since the sixteenth century (cf. PSIM part V). In broad form consideration of this simplified atomistic or ‘corpuscularian’ scientific picture will bring out the central issues with which we shall be grappling throughout this book.

The clash of the images and the status of the sensible qualities

Following Sellars, let us take as our central case one of the most famous difficulties that arose within the new Galilean and Newtonian scientific frameworks, according to which, we shall suppose, every material object is entirely composed of complex swarms of very tiny, imperceptible atoms. This was the problem of the place of color and other sensible qualities within this new ‘particulate’ or atomistic ontology.4 In ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ Sellars refers to the British physicist Arthur S. Eddington's famous description, in his book The Nature of the Physical World (1931), of the ‘two’ very different ‘tables,’ so to speak, which he is led to conceive in relation to the one table at which he is sitting. As Eddington writes of his ‘two tables’:

One of them has been familiar to me from my earliest years. […] It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is colored; above all it is substantial. […] Table no. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it.5 It does not belong to the world previously mentioned – that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. […] My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. […] There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space – space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force, but these are assigned to the category of ‘influences’, not of ‘things’. […] I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there – wherever ‘there’ may be. (Eddington 1931: 70–2)

Eddington's example of the ‘two tables’ brings out dramatically – if somewhat problematically6 – the central philosophical problem-space that Sellars epitomizes in the phrase the clash of the images (PSIM 25). Sellars himself frames the issue and the main resulting philosophical options, as he sees them, as follows:

The initial challenge of the scientific image was directed at the manifest image of inanimate nature. It proposed to construe physical things, in a manner already adumbrated by Greek atomism, as systems of imperceptible particles, lacking the perceptible qualities of manifest nature. Three lines of thought seemed to be open: (1) Manifest objects are identical with systems of imperceptible particles in that simple sense in which a forest is identical with a number of trees. (2) Manifest objects are what really exist; systems of imperceptible particles being ‘abstract’ or ‘symbolic’ ways of representing them. (3) Manifest objects are ‘appearances’ to human minds of a reality which is constituted by systems of imperceptible particles. (PSIM 26)

The sort of ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘anti-realist’ empiricist approaches to the nature of scientific explanation characteristic of (2), and against which Sellars launches strong independent arguments, will be among the topics examined in chapter 2. Let us focus here, then, on introducing Sellars' general attitude toward (1) and (3).

Sellars argues against (1) by means of what has come to be known as his grain argument (‘grain’ here basically refers to the ‘particulate’ ontology of microphysics), which he articulates in terms of his well-known example of a pink ice cube.7 While it is of course true, he points out, that “systems [can] have properties which their parts do not have,” the “case of a pink ice cube, it would seem clear, cannot be treated in this way”:

Pink does not seem to be made up of imperceptible qualities in the way in which being a ladder is made up of being cylindrical (the rungs), rectangular (the frame), wooden, etc. The manifest ice cube presents itself to us as something which is pink through and through, a pink continuum, all the regions of which, however small, are pink. It presents itself to us as ultimately homogeneous; and an ice cube variegated in colour is, though not homogeneous in its specific colour, ‘ultimately homogeneous’, in the sense to which I am calling attention, with respect to the generic trait of being coloured. (PSIM 26)

A few preliminary clarificatory comments on this passage are in order.

Sellars chooses the example of a transparent pink ice cube looking smoothly pink through and through, in all its perceptible parts – homogeneously pink, to use Sellars' technical term – in part because it vividly illustrates his claim that our manifest conception (or equivalently, for Sellars, the ‘phenomenology’) of ordinary perceptible physical objects takes them in general to have colors as their intrinsic contents.8 We ‘see of’ an apple its smooth reddish surface, for example, and we vividly imagine the juicy whiteness (to mix sense modalities) of its insides. Sellars calls these intrinsic sensible features of objects their occurrent sensible qualities, as opposed to their ‘dispositional’ and causal properties. A given pink cube might appear to be ice, but whether it is in fact a piece of ice or not depends on its ‘iffy’ causal properties: if you put it in your drink, for instance, it will cool your drink. The cube's iciness is a dispositional or causal property of the cube, whereas the pinkness is an occurrent sensible property of the cube.

Many scientists and philosophers have been tempted to interpret the colors of objects, too, as causal or dispositional (‘iffy’) properties rather than intrinsic contents or features of those objects. Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and many other thinkers influenced by scientific considerations argued that the colors, sounds, tastes, and other proper sensibles that we ascribe to objects are mere secondary qualities or causal ‘powers’ of those objects to produce the corresponding experiences or sensations of color, sound, etc., in the perceiver. These causal powers were conceived to be based on the primary qualities or common sensible properties of size, shape, motion, etc., that were taken to be properly ascribable to the matter (ultimately, the imperceptible atoms, etc.) that makes up the physical world as it is in itself. However, while Sellars will eventually contend that something like such an account is ultimately correct (along the lines of (3) above), such views are badly mistaken if they are put forward as an account or analysis of the conceptual structure of our ordinary or manifest experience of the world. As Sellars puts the phenomenological point, “Only a theory-intoxicated philosopher can look at a pink ice cube in daylight and suppose that to see it to be pink is to see it to have the power to cause normal observers to have sensations of pink when they look at it in daylight” (SK I.26). As conceived within the manifest image or in ordinary experience, the colors of objects are as much intrinsic properties of them as their shapes, which, as Bishop Berkeley rightly pointed out in his critique of Locke, occur seamlessly together as the form and content of the objects of our manifest experiences.

Sellars' so-called ‘grain argument’ in the passage above is very roughly that, contrary to the suggestion in (1) above, the “ultimately homogeneous” occurrent pinkness that is intrinsic to the manifest-perceptible pink ice cube as presented to us cannot plausibly be identified with or reduced to any properties or relations of the system of imperceptible objects of which science informs us the ice cube is nonetheless entirely composed.9 In reflecting on this point Sellars puts forward what he takes to be a plausible “principle of reducibility” (PSIM 35, italics added; cf. SSIS), “which can be formulated approximately as follows”:

If an object is in a strict sense a system of objects, then every property of the object must consist in the fact its constituents have such and such qualities and stand in such and such relations or, roughly,

every property of a system of objects consists of properties of, and relations between, its constituents. (PSIM 27)

According to Sellars, once the scientific image ontology is on the table, and every physical object is thus conceived to be “in a strict sense a system of objects” in the form of swarms of colorless, imperceptible microphysical particles, our innocence is lost. We can no longer account for the sensible qualities of objects in the way that we can explain their structural and functional properties (recall the ladder example), namely in terms of “properties of, and relations between” their ultimate constituent parts.

It was considerations such as these that led Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and the other thinkers to conclude “that manifest physical objects are ‘appearances’ to human perceivers of systems of imperceptible particles which is alternative (3) above” (PSIM 27). This is not the absurd claim that the objects of common sense lack color – of course bananas are yellow – but rather the philosophical claim that the significance of the entire framework conception or manifest image of physical objects must be reconceived if it is to be properly integrated or ‘stereoscopically fused’ with the emerging scientific image of the nature of reality:

It is familiar fact that those features of the manifest world which play no role in mechanical explanation were relegated by Descartes and other interpreters of the new physics to the minds of the perceiver. Colour, for example, was said to exist only in sensation; its esse to be percipi. It was argued, in effect, that what scientifically motivated reflection recognizes to be states of the perceiver are conceptualized in ordinary experience as traits of independent physical things, indeed that these supposed independent coloured things are actually conceptual constructions which ape the mechanical systems of the real world. (PSIM 29)

Again, this “is not the denial of a belief within a framework, but a challenge to the framework” (PSIM 27). Sellars' own ultimate view, despite his many sharp disagreements with Descartes, will share much in common with the broadly Cartesian view expressed in the passage quoted above. The road will be a long one, however, for many of the subsequent bites into the apple after the initial loss of innocence led the early modern philosophers from Descartes to Hume down certain tempting dark corridors out of which philosophers are still attempting to find their way today.

Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical systems?