Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism by Reider Patrick J

Author:Reider, Patrick J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474238946
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Notes

1http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/26/oklahoma-new-earthquakecapitaloflower48.html [accessed September 7, 2015].

2As I’ve discussed elsewhere, there are really two separable forms of idealism and thus two idealist traditions in modern Western philosophy. One of these, associated with empiricist thinkers such as Berkeley or Hume, is fundamentally epistemological, motivated primarily by the conviction that we have direct epistemic access only to our own mental states and worried that we have no right to infer the existence of anything different in kind from them. The idealist tradition I am concerned with is more directly ontological, motivated by the conviction that primary being must have the (active) structure of a mind. The structure of mind is then understood in terms of the fundamental cognitive/conative activities: reasoning (both theoretical and practical) and judging, both of which employ the fundamental elements of mental activity: concepts and sensations. Even apparently non-mental things exhibit structural features and relations that can be assimilated to such mentalistic structures. As Hegel might put it, “Substance is subject.” My earlier discussion is in deVries (2009).

3Before the rise of modern logic, though, not everyone thought of inference as a relation between propositions. Despite their otherwise immense differences, both Hume and Hegel think of inference as primarily a relation among ideas or concepts.

4I follow Sellars here in using “shall” and “shall be” as operators that signal an expression of intention, which differs from both a description of intention and an attribution of intention. Practical reasoning combines one’s antecedent intentions with one’s understanding of the factual situation to generate new intentions and, eventually, volitions.

5We could also get into complex metaphysical arguments about the status of possible modal statuses. But that is not a direction I want to explore here.

6There is a standard set of abbreviations for Sellars’ works that I use, many of which have been reprinted in several places (see http://www.ditext.com/sellars/bib-s.html). The bibliography spells out the relevant abbreviation for the works cited here. I give section or paragraph numbers when possible, as well as page location in specific texts.

7Rebecca Kukla (2000).

8I have worked out my interpretation of Hegel’s response to Kant on teleology in deVries (1991). It is available as well on my website: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~wad/Archive/archivefrontpage.htm

9Mark Okrent asks “How can teleology and agency make naturalistic sense if it isn’t reducible to beliefs and desires, and intentions treated as causes?” He points out that there are several different ways to try to answer this. My own view is that philosophers have gotten overly narrow in their interpretation of causation, thinking that all causal explanation must be in terms of mechanical causation, whereas the manifest image notion of causation is not so narrowly constrained. Not all good explanations are mechanical. There is some indication that Sellars himself thought that restricting causation to the mechanical was overly narrow. See FMPP, III (“Is Consciousness Physical?”), section VI: 83–4.

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