MY BOOKS by James O'Shea
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, 2017
Kant’s monumental book the Critique of Pure Reason was arguably the most conceptually revolutiona... more 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. But 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 nonconceptual content in perception, and the soundness of his transcendental arguments. This volume will engage readers of Kant at all levels.
(James R. O’Shea is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (2007) and _Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: An Introduction and Interpretation_ (2012), and the editor of _Sellars and His Legacy_ (2016).
Sellars and His Legacy, 2016
ABSTRACT: This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the... more ABSTRACT: 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.
Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
-This pdf includes pp. 1-40 (Introduction and Chapter One).
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief ... more -This pdf includes pp. 1-40 (Introduction and Chapter One).
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief sketch of Kant’s life and the historical context 1
Approaching the text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11
1 METAPHYSICS AND THE “FIERY TEST OF CRITIQUE” 13
1.1 Rational metaphysics: the highest aims of speculative reason 13
1.2 ‘Appearances’ versus ‘things in themselves’: Kant’s
transcendental idealism 26
2 WAKING FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS: HUME AND
THE ANTINOMIES 40
2.1 Hume’s scepticism and the problem of synthetic a priori
judgments
2.2 The Antinomies of Pure Reason 50
2.3 Elusive totalities and the interests of reason: Kant’s critical
solution 62
3 SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY 78
3.1 Space and time as pure forms of sensory intuition 82
3.2 Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism concerning space
and time 97
3.3 ! e problem of aff ection and ‘things in themselves’ 106
CONTENTS
viii
4 THE CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE
THINKING SELF 116
4.1 Conceptual thinking: the categories as a priori forms
of understanding 116
4.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 132
5 ONE LAWFUL NATURE 158
5.1 Applying categories to the world in the Principles of Pure
Understanding 158
5.2 Substance and causality, self and nature: a metaphysics
of experience 173
6 CONCLUSION: PURE REASON’S ROLE IN KANT’S METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE 205
6.1 Clipping the wings of pure speculative reason 205
6.2 Kant’s critique of speculative theology in “! e Ideal of Pure
Reason” 207
6.3 The validity of pure reason’s immanent regulative principles 214
Bibliography 225
Index 231
This pdf includes the Introduction, Chapter One, and Conclusion (Ch. 7), plus Notes and Sellars B... more This pdf includes the Introduction, Chapter One, and Conclusion (Ch. 7), plus Notes and Sellars Bibliography.
-CONTENTS of the volume:
Introduction 1
1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10
The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and
scientifi c images 10
The clash of the images and the status of the sensible
qualities 14
Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical
systems? 17
2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23
Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c
theories 24
Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c
realism 32
The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41
3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48
Approaching thought through language: is meaning a
relation? 49
Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55
The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’
nominalism 63
Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the
metalinguistic account 69
4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77
Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77
Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the
space of meanings 83
Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner
thoughts 86
Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of
thinking 97
5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the
Given 106
The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107
Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118
Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our
knowledge 125
Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our
sensory experiences 136
6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143
Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144
Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147
Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158
The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute
processes 163
7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative
Turn 176
The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176
Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178
Persons in the synoptic vision 185
Notes 191
Bibliography 228
Index 243
CONTENTS (below; Note: Eric and I received permission from Jeff Sicha of Ridgeview Publishing Ltd... more CONTENTS (below; Note: Eric and I received permission from Jeff Sicha of Ridgeview Publishing Ltd. to put the full pdf of this book up online):
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy: 'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
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'
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'
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
MY ARTICLES by James O'Shea
To appear in: Javier Cumpa, ed., _Categorial Ontologies: From Realism to Eliminativism_ (Routledge), during 2020-2021., 2020
ABSTRACT: I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends... more ABSTRACT: I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends a long line of nominalistic thinking about the nature of the categories from Ockham and Kant to the Tractatus and Carnap, and that this theory is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’s most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human being in the world. Sellars’s distinctive contribution to this longstanding (if currently on the defensive) metaconceptual approach to the nature of ontological categories was to interpret and reconstruct it in terms of his own ‘meaning as use’ or norm-governed inferential role semantics. With these resources Sellars sought to preserve the genuine insights in the ‘realist’ or broadly platonic traditions while simultaneously defending the idea that in the end, as he puts it, “a naturalistic ontology must be a nominalistic ontology” (1980a NAO IV §129).
To appear in: Sorin Baiasu and Mark Timmons, eds., The Kantian Mind, London and New York: Routledge, during 2020-21., 2021
ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of ... more ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis for presenting some of the most familiar ‘analytic Kantian’ themes that continue to animate current debates. I also argue that the complex relationships between Sellars’ philosophy and Kant’s thought are often misunderstood. Overall the chapter examines Sellars’ analytic appropriations of Kant in three topic-areas of significant current philosophical debate: (1) conceptual analysis and the structure of human knowledge; (2) laws of nature, the causal modalities, and the pragmatic or relative a priori; and (3) the disputes concerning Kant and nonconceptual content.
In _Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy_. Stefan Brandt and Anke Breunig, eds. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 110–29. Identifiers: LCCN 2019031972 print, LCCN 2019031973 ebook, ISBN 9780815384991 hardback ISBN 9781351202756 ebook., 2020
ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its mo... more ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its motivation and in its content, whether considered conceptually, historically, or in his own estimation, and that this is the case even in the important respects in which his views differ from most pragmatists. However, this assessment has been rejected by many recent pragmatists, with “classicalist” pragmatists frequently objecting to Sellars’s analytic-pragmatist privileging of language at the alleged expense of experience, while many analytic pragmatists themselves emphasize that Sellars’s philosophy arguably runs against the grain of pragmatism in central respects, with Brandom for instance recently remarking that “Sellars never explicitly identified himself with pragmatism.” Part I explores the classical pragmatist influences on the development of Sellars’s philosophy, with reference to aspects of the intellectual background in which those views formed. Part II then outlines more abstractly some of the enduring pragmatist themes in Sellars’s philosophy, including his conceptions of the myth of the given, the space of reasons, and his normative-inferentialist theory of meaning. I conclude in Part III with Sellars’s views on truth and “picturing,” which present a complex case for the question of “how pragmatist” Sellars’s views both were and ought to be.
British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019
ABSTRACT
Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in expe... more 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.
Oxford Handbook of William James, 2019
ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a rec... more ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2019
This is an outstanding collection of eleven newly commissioned articles by leading figures in the... more This is an outstanding collection of eleven newly commissioned articles by leading figures in the recent debates on nonconceptualist and conceptualist interpretations of Kant's theory of cognition, with applications also to his accounts of agency and aesthetics. The contributors will be well known to anyone who has been following those recent debates Lucy Allais, Sacha Golob, Anil Gomes, Stefanie Grüne, Robert Hanna, Dietmar H. Heidemann, Thomas Land, Colin McLear, Christian Onof, Dennis Schulting, Andrew Stephenson, and Clinton Tolley. The primary focus of the majority of the contributions, appropriately enough, is on the classic question as to how to interpret correctly the role of sensible intuition and its relationship to conceptual thinking in Kant's account of perceptual cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason. In recent decades this topic has been reinvigorated by related disputes about nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception. The problem is one that cuts to the core of Kant's critical philosophy, and various proposed solutions to it over the years have proven difficult to reconcile with all of the relevant texts. This volume will update any interested reader on both the best current Kant scholarship on the matter and the philosophical problem itself insofar as it relates to the nature and coherence of Kant's transcendental philosophy.
In: Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti, eds., Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology before the Great Divide, Routledge Studies in American Philosophy (London: Routledge), pp. 203–27, Jan. 2018., 2018
ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the ... more ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, _Mind and the World Order_, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains.
Luca Corti and Antonio Nunziante, eds. (2018), _Sellars and The History of Modern Philosophy_, 2018
ABSTRACT: Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant ... more ABSTRACT: Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant.
_From Rules to Meanings: New Essays on Inferentialism_, edited by Ondřej Beran, Vojtěch Kolman, Ladislav Koreň, 2018
ABSTRACT: Any normative inferentialist view confronts a set of challenges in the form of how to ... more ABSTRACT: Any normative inferentialist view confronts a set of challenges in the form of how to account for the sort of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary that is involved, paradigmatically, in our noninferential perceptual responses and knowledge claims. This chapter lays out that challenge, and then argues that Sellars’ original multilayered account of such noninferential responses in the context of his normative inferentialist semantics and epistemology shows how the inferentialist can plausibly handle those sorts of cases without stretching the notion of inference beyond its standard uses. Finally, it is suggested that for Sellars there were deeply naturalistic motivations for his own normative inferentialism, though the latter raises further questions as to whether this really represents, as Sellars thought, a genuinely scientific naturalist outlook on meaning and conceptual cognition.
The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux: Analytic and Continental Kantianism, edited by Fabio Gironi, Routledge, pp. 21–40., 2018
ABSTRACT: I examine how Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism in After Finitude, as I under... more ABSTRACT: I examine how Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism in After Finitude, as I understand it, relates firstly to Kant’s transcendental idealist philosophy, and secondly to the analytic Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars. I argue that central to the views of both Kant and Sellars is what might be called, with an ambivalent nod to Meillassoux, an objective correlationism. What emerges in the end as the recommended upshot of these analyses is a naturalistic Kantianism that takes the form of an empirical realism in roughly Kant’s sense, but one that is happily wed with Sellars’ scientific realism, once the latter is disentangled from two implausible commitments that made such a reconciliation seem impossible to Sellars himself.
Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by David Pereplyotchik and Deborah Barnbaum, Studies in American Philosophy Series (London: Routledge), pp. 15–35. ISBN 9781138670624.), 2017
ABSTRACT: Sellars once remarked on the “astonishing extent to which in ethics as well as in epis... more ABSTRACT: Sellars once remarked on the “astonishing extent to which in ethics as well as in epistemology and metaphysics the fundamental themes of Kant’s philosophy contain the truth of the variations we now hear on every side” (SM x). Also astonishing was Sellars’ 1970 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association (APA), which borrowed its title from the phrase in Kant’s Paralogisms, “...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks...” (B404). In its compact twenty-five pages Sellars managed to sketch novel yet plausible reconstructions of central aspects of Kant’s views on self-knowledge, persons, freedom, and morality, along the way suggesting how all of those Kantian views could plausibly be rendered consistent with a naturalistic ontology. In this chapter I focus on Sellars’ APA address as an occasion for reflection on how both Kant and Sellars offer insights into how we ought best to conceive the nature of and the relationships between our thinking selves, our practical agency, and our entirely natural, material embodiment.
In _Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy_, edited by David Pereplyotchik and Deborah Barnbaum, _Studies in American Philosophy Series_ (London: Routledge), pp. 232-243 (12 pages). ISBN 9781138670624., 2017
These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Autho... more These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).
In: Patrick J. Reider, ed., Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism (London and New York: Bloomsbury), 2017: pp. 19–39., 2017
ABSTRACT: Sellars formulated his thesis of 'psychological nominalism' in two very different way... more ABSTRACT: Sellars formulated his thesis of 'psychological nominalism' in two very different ways: (1) most famously as the thesis that 'all awareness of sorts…is a linguistic affair', but also (2) as a certain thesis about the 'psychology of the higher processes'. The latter thesis denies the standard view that relations to abstract entities are required in order to explain human thought and intentionality, and asserts to the contrary that all such mental phenomena can in principle ‘be accounted for causally' without any use of normative terms in the explanation. Recent 'Hegelian Sellarsians' such as Rorty, McDowell, and Brandom have argued that the holistic, normative themes in (1) support various non-realist or rather (German) 'idealist but common-sense realist' outlooks. By contrast, Sellars' own defenses of (2) reveal psychological nominalism itself to be a naturalistic empiricism intended to sustain the normative-holistic themes in (1) within an exhaustively scientific naturalist conception of reality.
James R. O’Shea, ed., Sellars and His Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 130–148., 2016
I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more par... more I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more particularly in relation to the nature and status of what he calls 'epistemic principles'; and I attempt to show that this remains a plausible and distinctive position even when detached from Sellars's quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible objects of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist, i.e., as conceived within that common sense framework. I first explain the complex Kant-inspired sense in which Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to persons. In this primary Kantian sense, I suggest, persons as thinkers and agents exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this in principle would enable an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology, one that is independent of Sellars's quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. Finally, I examine in some detail how this defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes turns out to be what is fundamental in Sellars's complex and controversial views on the nature and status of epistemic principles.
in: Robert Stern and Gabriele Gava, eds., Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy (London: Routledge): pp. 196–216. , 2016
Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of... more Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he developed as an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content.
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MY BOOKS by James O'Shea
(James R. O’Shea is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (2007) and _Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: An Introduction and Interpretation_ (2012), and the editor of _Sellars and His Legacy_ (2016).
Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief sketch of Kant’s life and the historical context 1
Approaching the text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11
1 METAPHYSICS AND THE “FIERY TEST OF CRITIQUE” 13
1.1 Rational metaphysics: the highest aims of speculative reason 13
1.2 ‘Appearances’ versus ‘things in themselves’: Kant’s
transcendental idealism 26
2 WAKING FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS: HUME AND
THE ANTINOMIES 40
2.1 Hume’s scepticism and the problem of synthetic a priori
judgments
2.2 The Antinomies of Pure Reason 50
2.3 Elusive totalities and the interests of reason: Kant’s critical
solution 62
3 SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY 78
3.1 Space and time as pure forms of sensory intuition 82
3.2 Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism concerning space
and time 97
3.3 ! e problem of aff ection and ‘things in themselves’ 106
CONTENTS
viii
4 THE CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE
THINKING SELF 116
4.1 Conceptual thinking: the categories as a priori forms
of understanding 116
4.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 132
5 ONE LAWFUL NATURE 158
5.1 Applying categories to the world in the Principles of Pure
Understanding 158
5.2 Substance and causality, self and nature: a metaphysics
of experience 173
6 CONCLUSION: PURE REASON’S ROLE IN KANT’S METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE 205
6.1 Clipping the wings of pure speculative reason 205
6.2 Kant’s critique of speculative theology in “! e Ideal of Pure
Reason” 207
6.3 The validity of pure reason’s immanent regulative principles 214
Bibliography 225
Index 231
-CONTENTS of the volume:
Introduction 1
1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10
The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and
scientifi c images 10
The clash of the images and the status of the sensible
qualities 14
Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical
systems? 17
2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23
Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c
theories 24
Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c
realism 32
The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41
3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48
Approaching thought through language: is meaning a
relation? 49
Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55
The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’
nominalism 63
Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the
metalinguistic account 69
4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77
Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77
Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the
space of meanings 83
Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner
thoughts 86
Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of
thinking 97
5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the
Given 106
The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107
Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118
Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our
knowledge 125
Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our
sensory experiences 136
6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143
Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144
Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147
Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158
The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute
processes 163
7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative
Turn 176
The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176
Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178
Persons in the synoptic vision 185
Notes 191
Bibliography 228
Index 243
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy: 'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
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'
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'
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
MY ARTICLES by James O'Shea
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.
(James R. O’Shea is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (2007) and _Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: An Introduction and Interpretation_ (2012), and the editor of _Sellars and His Legacy_ (2016).
Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief sketch of Kant’s life and the historical context 1
Approaching the text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11
1 METAPHYSICS AND THE “FIERY TEST OF CRITIQUE” 13
1.1 Rational metaphysics: the highest aims of speculative reason 13
1.2 ‘Appearances’ versus ‘things in themselves’: Kant’s
transcendental idealism 26
2 WAKING FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS: HUME AND
THE ANTINOMIES 40
2.1 Hume’s scepticism and the problem of synthetic a priori
judgments
2.2 The Antinomies of Pure Reason 50
2.3 Elusive totalities and the interests of reason: Kant’s critical
solution 62
3 SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY 78
3.1 Space and time as pure forms of sensory intuition 82
3.2 Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism concerning space
and time 97
3.3 ! e problem of aff ection and ‘things in themselves’ 106
CONTENTS
viii
4 THE CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE
THINKING SELF 116
4.1 Conceptual thinking: the categories as a priori forms
of understanding 116
4.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 132
5 ONE LAWFUL NATURE 158
5.1 Applying categories to the world in the Principles of Pure
Understanding 158
5.2 Substance and causality, self and nature: a metaphysics
of experience 173
6 CONCLUSION: PURE REASON’S ROLE IN KANT’S METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE 205
6.1 Clipping the wings of pure speculative reason 205
6.2 Kant’s critique of speculative theology in “! e Ideal of Pure
Reason” 207
6.3 The validity of pure reason’s immanent regulative principles 214
Bibliography 225
Index 231
-CONTENTS of the volume:
Introduction 1
1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10
The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and
scientifi c images 10
The clash of the images and the status of the sensible
qualities 14
Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical
systems? 17
2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23
Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c
theories 24
Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c
realism 32
The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41
3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48
Approaching thought through language: is meaning a
relation? 49
Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55
The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’
nominalism 63
Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the
metalinguistic account 69
4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77
Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77
Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the
space of meanings 83
Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner
thoughts 86
Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of
thinking 97
5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the
Given 106
The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107
Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118
Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our
knowledge 125
Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our
sensory experiences 136
6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143
Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144
Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147
Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158
The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute
processes 163
7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative
Turn 176
The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176
Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178
Persons in the synoptic vision 185
Notes 191
Bibliography 228
Index 243
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy: 'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
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'
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'
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
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.
I begin by introducing Peirce's pragmatic maxim viewed as a test of conceptual clarity that is also broadly reflected in most recognizably pragmatist accounts of meaning and conceptual content (section I). This serves as a lead-in to a selective examination of the tension as it arises in James’s career-long effort to provide a satisfactory account of ‘the cognitive relation’ that obtains between our ideas and their objects, focusing on the case of perceptual experience (section II). In section III the tension is seen as arising in part from a plausible tight connection between the pragmatic maxim and the rejection by pragmatists such as Peirce, Rorty, and Brandom of what Sellars called the ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars, 1956). Finally, however, I conclude in section IV by considering the grounds for the dissatisfaction expressed by many recent pragmatists with the resulting successor conception of experience to be found in Rorty and Brandom, and I offer a brief diagnosis of the tension that points to the general form of a satisfactory solution.