Sellarsian Looks

On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at The Analytic-Continental Divide – Daniel Sacilotto 2015

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- On Philosophical Methodology -

A Sellarsian Look at the Analytic-Continental Divide

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Introduction

In this essay I want to situate some of Sellars’ central epistemological and

metaphysical theses in the context of broad methodological concerns that have brought

about a fundamental divergence in mainstream approaches of the so-called ‘analytic’ and

‘continental’ traditions in 20th Century philosophy. In particular, I show how Sellars’ realist

appropriation of Kant – his ‘naturalism with a normative turn’, as James O’Shea calls it –

can be helpfully understood as a possible third-path or alternative between the wholesale

depreciation of epistemology and of the scientific method conceived by the Continental

post-Heideggerean tradition, on the one hand, and the continuation of epistemology and of

the scientific aspirations of philosophy within the context of the analytic ‘linguistic turn’, on

the other. The three major theses that I seek to draw from Sellars as bearing directly on this

methodological splitting are the following:

(1) His materialist transvaluation of Kant’s transcendental, critical philosophy. That

is, the idea that a post-critical materialist metaphysics is conditioned by a

propaedeutic enquiry into the articulation of the sapient behavior of animals

within ‘the space of reasons’. In other words, to understand how the non-

dogmatic prosecution of ontological univocity (“being is said in one and the same

sense of all its individuating instances”) supposes the endorsement of a

methodological dualism that distinguishes between reasons and causes, i.e. what

O’Shea has called the causal reducibility cum logical irreducibility of the relation

between the manifest and scientific images1.

(2) His rationalist assault on empiricist approaches to epistemology and the

philosophy of mind. I suggest that his famous critique of the Myth of the Given

can be extended beyond the phenomenalist and sense-datum theories that were

directly Sellars’ target, to understand better the limitations in the

1 O’Shea, James, Naturalism With a Normative Turn, Polity, 2007.


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phenomenological and post-epistemological approaches championed by the

post-Heideggerean Continental tradition.

(3) His dialectical articulation of the relation between the manifest and scientific

images, as providing both (a) the means to dispel the expanded version of the

Myth of the Given as providing a non-conceptual ‘pre-ontological’ understanding

of being, as well as (b) to resist the reification of the vocabulary of the manifest

image and of experiences as ontologically basic vocabularies that would lie

beyond the scope of revision. Taken together, these principles allow us to

envisage the idea of an epistemologically adjudicated, critical materialism that

does not fall under the mantle of what Heidegger calls ‘ontotheology’2.

In the first section, I provide a brief preliminary sketch of the methodological issues

that lie at the heart of the split between the two philosophical traditions and their

respective approaches. In particular, I focus on the place that each tradition thinks

epistemology and science occupies with respect to philosophical practice. In the second

section, I flesh out the underlying motivations behind these divergences in method by

considering three possible readings or genealogies, proposed mainly within the

Continental tradition, of the relationship between scientific and philosophical modernity,

distinguishing first an ‘orthodox’ reading which sees continuity between the two, and

second a ‘revisionary’ approach that diagnoses a radical splitting.

Finally, I explain how a third, ‘Sellarsian’ reading, informed by the three central

tenets outlined above, can be understood as preparing a successful resolution of these

divergences, by reconciling the radicalized critical impetus of the Continental tradition with

the insistence on the pertinence of epistemology and the adherence to the scientific

method, proper to the analytic tradition.

2 See in particular Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, University of Chicago Press, 2002.


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I – Methodological Preliminaries

One possible way to understand the division between the so-called ‘analytic’ and

‘continental’ philosophical traditions is to depart by understanding them as possible

reactions to the problems raised throughout modern rationalist and empiricist

epistemology, concerning the relation between thought and being. Famously, Richard

Rorty3 proposed to read the birth of the ‘analytic project of semantic analysis’ – as Robert

Brandom calls it4 – as a direct sequel to the Kantian rationalist, transcendental project in

linguistic key, thereby continuing the Enlightenment confidence that a theory of

knowledge, now informed by a rigorous understanding of language and meaning, would set

philosophy in “the secure path of the sciences”5. At heart, the broad genealogy traced by

Rorty hinges on diagnosing a parallel in methodological approaches between the two

philosophical moments: the semantic enquiry into the conditions for meaning and language

proper to the analytic tradition would thus be nothing but an iteration of Kant’s critical

project to ‘lay the ground’ for metaphysical enquiry. Accordingly, the violent reactions

against Hegelianism – and German Idealism more generally – that overtly inspire the

founding work of Moore and Russell would have been inadvertently underwritten by an

unconscious ‘Kantian underbelly’, well before Strawson, Carnap and Sellars would try to

recapture Kant’s legacy within the context of the linguistic turn.

With this said, the alleged complicity between Kant and the analytic tradition is

hardly uncontroversial. In contrast to the genealogy proposed by Rorty, Wilfrid Sellars

famously claimed that analytic philosophy had, if anything, lagged behind the critical turn

initiated by Kant, and had rather remained caught in its ‘Humean phase’6. When

characterizing the tradition in this way, Sellars of course had in mind the new wave of

phenomenalist and empiricist theories of mind which, in his estimation, fell prey to the

epistemological naiveté of what he attacked under the title of ‘The Myth of the Given’. To

bring analytic philosophy to its ‘Kantian phase’ would mean, first, to take the logical and

3 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1981. 4 Brandom, Robert, Between Saying and Doing: Towarda an Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford University Press, 2010. 5 Kant 1933: Bxiv 6 This is an attribution made by Robert Brandom. See Brandom, 2000, 32.


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semantic insights native to the linguistic turn beyond the strictly retrograde assumptions

which lingered in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In any case, whether one sees

the analytic tradition as continuing an exhausted Kantian rationalist legacy or rather as

lagging in its empiricist phase only to await its eventual critical moment, with Kant in its

future, these characterizations agree in seeing a fateful continuity between the scientific

aspirations of modern epistemology, and the analytic linguistic turn of the 20th Century.

But the post-Kantian ‘Continental’ philosophical tradition of the 20th Century did not

share a similar optimism and trust in epistemology, however reformed by the New Logic or

the philosophy of language, to set philosophy in ‘the secure path of the sciences’. Nor was

the latter ideal conceived as philosophy’s singular telos. Following Brandom again, we can

say if the incipient analytic tradition by and large continued the enthusiasm with reason

that animated modernity from Descartes to Hegel and beyond, then the Continental

tradition was largely taken by the disillusionment with reason that had emerged in the late

19th Century, with the manifold genealogical critiques of rationality, both local and global,

and whose central names were Marx, Nietzsche and Freud7.

Throughout the 20th Century, the ‘critique of critique’ that characterizes this

disillusionment would find its home in the various forms of phenomenological,

hermeneutic, and deconstructionist approaches, which followed roughly the genealogical

impetus of their 19th Century predecessors. So the story goes, the exacting methodological

scruples born in Kantian critique and the Enlightenment call to knowledge (sapere aude!)

would soon turn against themselves, once the latent, unexamined core of transcendental

philosophy was revealed as harboring all sorts of metaphysical prejudices, never mind its

aim to ‘lay the ground for metaphysics’. Canonically, Heidegger proposes to radicalize

Kant’s own attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge through a resolutely non-

epistemological, but rather existential and pragmatic kind of fundamental ontology, for

7 Brandom, Robert, Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutic of Magnanimity, available online at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/downloads/RGHM%20%2012-11-21%20a.docx


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which the question of knowledge is displaced from philosophical primacy so as to reveal

more primitive forms of intentionality than those tracked by the cognitive stance8.

Once critique is pushed to its limits, the very aspiration to make philosophy as

continuous with science becomes methodologically precarious, or so it was deemed, with

the common diagnosis that philosophy’s aspiration and alignment to the scientific method

was now understood as a pathological hang-up carried from the modern philosophical

ambitions, if not perversions. From Heidegger’s history of being (Geschichte des Seins)

leading to the assault on ‘ontotheology’, to Gadamer’s reconstruction of the hermeneutic

method and artistic truth, to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism against metaphysics

of presence, to Adorno’s assault on instrumental reason, to Foucault’s archeology of

knowledge, and in spite of the significant divergences between these approaches, we can

say that the Continental tradition largely conceived of the task of philosophy (or post-

philosophical ‘thinking’) as a definitive break with the guiding impetus of modernity

towards knowledge and the alignment of philosophy with science.

At the end of this vector of ‘radicalizing critique’, we find the repeated operation of a

'hermeneutics of suspicion' (to use Foucault’s term), progressively revealing further

prejudices in the philosophical text, pushing critique towards the limit of self-reflexivity,

even calling philosophy’s rights to exist into question. It is not surprise then to see that

Rorty’s characterization of the analytic tradition as being ‘Kantian’ in its epistemological

aspirations – however adapted to language – is but the obverse of his diagnosis of the

relative backwardness that it would have harbored in relation to the Continental post-

Kantian tradition and its destitution of epistemology from philosophical primacy.

So, two traditions, separated in would seem by a divergent appreciation of the

legacy of modernity, and in particular the conception of philosophy as continuous with

science or the scientific method. In what follows, I wish to clarify how philosophical

methodology articulates itself in relation to its ‘scientific condition’, by proposing a

8 As is well known, Heidegger also proposes to disassociate Kant from “epistemology”, by establishing a continuity between the question about synthetic a priori judgments and the attempts to ground Metaphyica Generalis, inherited or ontology in the broadest possible sense, as inherited from the Scholastic ontology. See Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Indiana, pp. 11-12.


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schematic, three-stage dialectic about the history of scientific and philosophical modernity.

To do this, I accordingly propose to trace three possible readings about the relation

between philosophical and scientific modernity on whose basis we can better assess the

demands for a contemporary philosophy that traverses the disjunction between its analytic

and ‘Continental’ trajectories. It is precisely the work of Sellars that embodies and

anticipates how this traversal is to be carried out.

II - Philosophical and Scientific Modernity

(a) The Orthodox Reading – Continuity and Perversion

According to the history I call 'orthodox', one would find a continuity between the

scientific revolutions initiated by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and the philosophical

modernity that emerges with the advent of epistemology in the wake of Cartesian doubt,

leading to the 'critical method' in Kant's transcendental philosophy. In a famous passage

from the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself describes

his methodological guidelines by drawing an analogy to what he takes to be 'the primary

hypothesis' of the Copernican revolution: the realization that, whatever nature is taken to

be, its objects must be seen as somehow conforming to our knowledge of them:

"We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects9.

For the Continental tradition of the 20th Century however, undermining the

rationalist optimism borne in Kant’s epoch-grounding declaration, this stipulated

continuity between science and philosophy would result ultimately in a kind of fatal

complicity, or so the story goes. Thus, as we briefly surmised in the first section, the

9 Kant, Immanuel, Preface to Critique of Pure Reason, second edition.


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hermeneutic scrutiny of the 20th Century post-critical philosophy, waging against the

legacy of the Enlightenment, would systematically establish a thwarted and direct

continuity between the pursuits of modern science and its philosophical counterparts.

According to this narrative, familiar to Heidegger and Adorno, among others, philosophy

and science would share a pernicious, if not dogmatic, obsession with 'knowing', a

restriction of thought to 'cognition', a radical forgetfulness of the fundamental question of

'being', and a blind trust in the powers of calculation leading to technological waywardness,

just to name a few of the evils imputed against the ethos of the Enlightenment.10

The optimist vanguardism with which modernity claimed to position itself in

relation to its past would end up, according to these genealogies, tacitly reifying further

unquestioned dogmas, revealed only in an eventual and violent 'deconstruction' of our

metaphysically laden past, finally moving us to a 'post-modernity' that brings necessary

moderation to the rhetoric of Enlightenment; an awakened historical consciousness that

embraces historical-discursive contingency to its ultimate consequences, and encourages

distrust in the utopia of reason.

(b) The Revisionist View

More recently, however, a 'revisionist' reading of the history of modernity, has

stipulated a radical divorce between its philosophical and scientific sides. Some of its

central proponents include the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, the Iranian

philosopher Reza Negarestani, the English philosopher Nick Land, and others11. It is also,

like the orthodox reading, partially anticipated in the variegated genealogical challenges

that emerge in 19th Century philosophy against Enlightenment rationalism. But according

to this reading, the philosophical ‘transcendental revolution’ in truth camouflaged the

lingering temptation of a kind of anthropocentric conservatism, already incubated in Kant’s

idealism. Thus, although Enlightenment rationalism saw it to secularize the objects of

knowledge by delimiting them within the bounds of possible experience, in doing so it

10 The two canonical texts in this regard remain in my estimation Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 11 See in particular Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2007.


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nevertheless continued to harbor a residual piety in the side of the human subject, whose

transcendental status vis a vis the order of being was said to resist a thoroughbred

naturalization. The exorcizing of all divinity would thus remain incomplete as long as the

agency of the subject, and the Kingdom of Ends as its collateral teleology, is still conceived

in exception to the causal lawfulness of the natural order12.

Refusing the wholesale denunciation of rationality and the cognitive pursuit

towards knowledge, the revisionary history nevertheless sees the philosophical

Enlightenment as failing to aligning speculation to the solemn conquests of the epoch's

scientific revolutions. Thus, while the modern scientific break mainly worked to achieve

the derogation of the theological conception of the world, opening a secular, cosmological

horizon of exploration for thought beyond the safe cohorts of the Earth and the familiarity

of human experience, philosophical modernity, along with its epistemological invention,

served instead as a reactive movement, binding thought to the confines of an 'immobile

Earth' and the strictures of an static transcendental subject. This ‘Ptolemaic counter-

revolution’ with respect to scientific modernity, as the French philosopher Quentin

Meillassoux calls it, far from being called into question by hermeneutic, phenomenological,

or deconstructive wisdom, finds itself further exacerbated through it, subordinating the

cosmological explorations of science to the familiarity of our lifeworld, of 'Dasein's

everydayness, or of culturally configured socio-discursive dimensions13. So, those

proponents of the orthodox reading who diagnose a residual metaphysical baggage in

Kant’s edifice would have merely intensified the ‘exceptionalism’ of the human,

subordinating the Natural world explored by the scientific method to the agent who does

not only know but furthermore determines being according to its own capacities.

12 Kant's attempt to neatly separate the quid juris (or epistemological questions concerning justification) from the quid facti (the causal-factual questions concerning the lawful relation between natural events) becomes precarious once the presumed autonomy of the former is evinced as being tacitly determined by the material efficacy of the latter. As Brandom puts it, "…what the genealogists dug down to is not just causes distorting our reasons, but causes masquerading as reasons.12" However, it is important to remember that the genealogical challenges to Enlightenment reason also questioned the very notions of facticity and causation which Brandom incorrectly takes to characterize all genealogical thought.

13 Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, chapter 4.


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This vicious removal of philosophy from science cannot but thus amputate the

powers of the intellect from the amplified navigational horizons set by scientific thought,

where thought appears as the vehicle to think of a reality that reaches well-beyond human

existence or even Life, and where the exceptional being of the homo sapient appears but the

product of a contingency rather than a purposeful fulguration. Bemoaning the ensuing

conservatism of philosophy in relation to the formal and natural sciences, and following

through Meillassoux's revisionary diagnosis to the end, Gabriel Catren proposes a 'true

philosophical modernity', one that would see past the anti-realist configuration of Kantian

transcendental philosophy and the legacy of critique:

"Rather than accepting that a genuine transcendental revolution is nothing but the angelic beginning of inhuman terror, even Kant used his critique to demonstrate that science would never be able to sublate the humanity of its subjective local supports... Philosophy will finally be modern only if it can sublate the critical moment, crush the Ptolemaic counter-revolution and deepen the narcissistic wounds inflicted by modern science14.

Failing to coordinate different entities in different ontological domains (Descartes'

'connection problem' to relate the res cogitans with the res extensa), or failing to coordinate

the different faculties of transcendental subjectivity (Kant's attempt to coordinate the

understanding and intuition), the modern epistemological venture tips into dualism as it

disassociates the structure of thought from the cold cosmological expanses discovered by

modern science. To traverse the faux philosophical modernity means to denounce that

piety for what it is, and to render our manifest and historical self-understanding as liable to

revision as any of our postulates concerning the natural world. The stipulated 'real

transcendental revolution' would be something like a Promethean gesture to counter the

Ptolemaic reaction; a leap by virtue of which the intellect would no longer seclude itself

with regard to the rest of the natural universe, but through which it finally dares to reach

onto the inexhaustible cosmos of which it is part.

14 Catren, Gabriel, Outland Empire, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, re. press, 2011.


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III – The Post-Revisionist Reading – The Naturalization of Kant

From this schematic outline, we appear cornered between an orthodox

‘transcendentalist’ view according to which one must above all reject the reduction of

subjectivity and of thought to objective phenomena and to the methods used to investigate

the Natural world, and a resolutely ‘materialist’ view that re-inscribes thought within the

natural order. For the latter, the former appears as the last cry of religious piety, for the

former, the latter appears as the ensuing vestige of metaphysical dogmatism. It should thus

seem unsurprising to see that the two great rejections of metaphysics in the continental

and analytic traditions appear broadly distributed along this axis. Thus whereas for the

post-Heideggerean continental tradition the analytic schools remain encumbered by the

nefarious hopes for an epistemology over-determined by an unquestioned ‘metaphysics of

presence’, for the analytic orthodoxy the Continental appeals to the irreducibility of the

experiential and historical-textual-cultural mediation appears as a pious form of anti-

realism or relativism, resisting the desirable fate of scientific specialization15.

Where should we go from here? From the revisionist reading I propose that we

draw the following lesson: in conceiving of subjectivity as the ground of ontological

reflection, radically separated from the material world described by the natural sciences,

transcendental philosophy risked to delegate our self-conception to the authority of our

phenomenological wisdom, hypostasizing the vocabulary of immediate experience or the

concepts laden in the manifest image. This separation of man from the rest of the Natural

world prevents us from understanding how it is that the rich kinds of intentionality that we

associate with our practical and conceptual activities nevertheless nevertheless develop

from the capacities and behavior of sentient beings as well as the inanimate material world.

The post-Kantian transcendental philosophers of the Continental tradition ironically begin

15 One might object that this way of reconstructing the historical period in question conspicuously ignores the legacy of Wittgenstein, who did as much to raise doubts about the aspirations of the early analytic semantic project and of logical empiricism, as perhaps Heidegger did with regards to the scientific aspirations of Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, it remains true that in the long run, this has done little to dissuade the ensuing vector towards scientific specialization in the field. Thus, Scott Soames, in his two-volume history of 20th Century analytic thought, seems content in describing Moore and Russell as having done away with the Hegelian rot, and welcomes the increasing specialization in the discipline as a sign of maturity and progress. See Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, introduction.


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by seeking to expose unquestioned prejudices latent in the modern philosophical

enterprise, but end up instead reifying a given phenomenological, natural-linguistic

vocabulary as being ontologically fundamental, accessible from the armchair, and beyond

revision. To traverse the orthodox reading means to denounce this piety for what it is, and

to render our manifest self-understanding as liable to revision as any of our postulates

concerning the natural world. This holds even if we must agree with transcendental

approach that the investigation into the capacities for description and reasoning which

allow for enquiry into the natural world is not itself an enquiry into the ontological

constitution of a kind of entity, not even “the being for whom his being is an issue” or

whose mode of being is ‘existence’ (Heidegger)16.

The idea that the vocabulary to describe our experience of the world – in its

conceptual, pragmatic and sensory dimensions- is simultaneously liable to revision but is

also not empirical in scope, of course, lies at the heart of Sellars’ famous critique of the

Myth of the Given. For the critique of the Given is, also, a critique of the view according to

which the categories we use to describe our experience of the world are foundational and

non-revisable, accessed directly by introspection, bestowed by the causal affection of the

senses, or simply available to an awakened historical consciousness. To inflate our

phenomenological or intentional vocabularies to the ranks of ‘fundamental ontology’ is to

assume that the categories of experience are precisely such unproblematic Givens.

This is why I propose that, although the critique of the Myth of the Given has

canonically targeted the view according to which there is a subset of our cognitive states

which are foundational with regards to all other states (i.e. following DeVries, states which

are (i) epistemically basic or independent of any other cognitive states, and (ii) which

warrant the subject's non-basic cognitive states), we can amplify its scope to target

positions according to which these foundational states are not ‘cognitive’ or conceptual at

all. Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of being, which

includes the pragmatic disclosure of the world of ‘tools’ (Zeug) or the ‘ready-to-hand’

16 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, reprint 2008.


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(Zuhandenheit) as a kind of ‘know-how’, and in relation to which knowing-that or cognition

(Vorhandenheit) is merely derived, is precisely such a view17.

The point is not to say that conceptual activity is ‘more fundamental’ with respect to

transparent coping, but simply to remind us that (a) non-conceptual behavior only

deserves to be called understanding to the extent that it is liable to conceptual explicitation,

and (b) that the vocabulary that we use to make our know-how or non-conceptual

experiences explicit is no less problematic than the vocabulary we use to describe entities

in a theoretical or cognitive register. Indeed it is to acknowledge that to describe

experience is to assume the cognitive stance by taking our practical, sensory and cognitive

capacities as the objects of enquiry, even if (in the case of thinkings).

This yields an expansion of what Willem DeVries has called the ‘immediacy of the

mental’, which we name here the immediacy of the experiential, and which can be used to

characterize the ‘phenomenological’ or ‘existential’ variants of the Myth of the Given18:

(Immediacy of the Experiential) For any subject S, if S is in an experiential state with content C, then C can always be directly cognizable by introspection, intellectual intuition or phenomenological self-assessment, i.e. C is experientially given C is available to some form of understanding.

In sum, the vocabularies that we help ourselves to describe experience from the

manifest image cannot be simply ‘ontologized’ in pains of vitiating the critical injunction

that our descriptive vocabularies be themselves adjudicated, whether these appeal to

entities for knowledge, or ‘tools’ for engaged practice.

By the same token, to depreciate all empirical or ‘ontic’ investigation as lifeless

abstractions is to confuse the logical and chronological priority of the manifest image with

ontological priority. For although it is true that the scientific image derives historically

from the manifest image, this is not to say that the scientific image must be merely heuristic

or instrumental with respect to claims advanced within the manifest image.

17 Ibid. 18 DeVries, Willem, Getting Beyond Idealisms, in Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford, 2010, pp. 217.


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This insight lies at the core of Sellars critique of instrumentalist and approaches to

the philosophy of science, and informs his defense of the ontological status of the

theoretical entities postulated by contemporary science, as suitable successor concepts to

the categories of ‘folk-science’ and our manifest self-understanding. Sellars’ basic strategy

here, as is well known, consists in reconceiving the distinction between the observable and

the unobservable in epistemic rather than ontological terms: for any entity or posit x to be

observable is for there to be claims concerning x which can acquire the status of perceptual

reports, i.e. non-inferential uses such that they can play the role of language-entry

transitions for a given language. Conversely, theoretical entities are those for which no such

observational uses exist. It follows that the distinction between the observable and what is

unobservable is porous, a feature concerning the use of specific vocabularies and linguistic

tokens, rather than a characterization of the contents or referents postulated by the

vocabularies as such.

So while it might well be true that observational concepts make up the ‘ground-

level’, non-inferential reports triggered by sensory experience, this does not mean that

these concepts are either self-justifying states causally acquired from experience, or that

they are beyond revision, i.e. they are not ‘Given’ in the pejorative sense. Sellars clearly

summarizes this point in Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism19:

“[T]o reject the Myth of the Given is not to commit oneself to the idea that empirical knowledge as it is now constituted has no rock bottom level of observation predicates proper. It is to commit oneself rather to the idea that even if it does have a rock bottom level, it is still in principle replaceable by another conceptual framework in which these predicates do not, strictly speaking, occur.”

Once depurated from its residual piety, the thinking mind finds itself to be just as

problematic with the Nature which it explores, which is to say that knowledge of ourselves,

as beings in the world, is not fundamentally different that knowledge of the worldly objects we

describe in the third person. This holds, again, even if we reckon that, qua sapient beings, we

19 Sellars, Wilfrid, Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism in Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Ridgeview, 1967.


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must distinguish the functional and normative dimension of conceptual thought before we

understand what it means to make empirical descriptions of what the world happens to be.

This leads us to the next point. From the orthodox reading, I propose that we draw

the following lesson: to dissolve the critical exigency to adjudicate our theses about the

world, threatens to slip right back into dogmatic metaphysics in all its forms. In the last

instance, the 'disintegration' of critique reveals itself, in the name of a 'authentically

modern' stance, as ignoring rather than resolving the epistemological and skeptical

problematic that inspired Kant to propose the critical enquiry into the conditions for

metaphysics. The basic lesson of the great ‘critics’ and genealogists remains ours: thought

does not have guaranteed access to being (as the idealist thesis of intellectual intuition

would have it), nor is it its unproblematic 'expression' (as the vitalist Bergsonist and

Deleuzean panpsychist thesis would have it). Thought must think of the conditions under

which it can think being, or indeed anything whatsoever. And it is this dimension of

enquiry which, Kant tells us, is not-objective, insofar as to ask about the conditions of

possibility to think of what there exists empirically is not itself to undertake an empirical

investigation into the material structure of the thinker who questions. It is rather asking

what criteria must be met so that any empirical investigation could be carried out, what

must obtain so that empirical knowledge can ever take place. So, with the orthodox history,

we must also accept, however minimally, a 'critical' attitude which curbs our ontological

enthusiasm, and which prevents the idealist conflation of the normative and natural orders.

This principle, together with the lessons drawn from the revisionary history,

provide the basis to understand the twofold ambition proper to the Sellarsian project,

which Jim O’Shea has helpfully schematized in terms of the “causal reducibility cum logical

irreducibility” of the manifest image with respect to the scientific image20. That is, the

ambition to reconcile the idea that intelligence is on the one hand something that occurs in

a resolutely material universe, bound by objective laws like everything else, and the idea

that there is a dimension of thought which remains nevertheless not tractable by an

empirical account of its material conditions. Thinking is causally reducible insofar as it is

20 O’Shea, James, Naturalism With a Normative Turn.


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only by virtue of being instantiated in material bodies that intelligence can operate. But

thinking is also logically irreducible insofar as it is the concept of the subject as a logical

unit which provides the functional kernel of agency, intelligence and reasoning, and it is

this dimension which can be abstracted and specified irrespective of the material

constraints of the system. Subjectivity is in this functional sense transcendental with

regards to its empirical or material constraints. For to specify what a system ought to do in

order to count as engaging in conceptual thought, that is, how it ought to behave to count as

sapient, again, is not to say anything about what it must be, even if it turns out that the

pragmatic routines implied by intelligence can only occur under very specific material

constraints.

The reconciliation of the normative conception of thinking which depurates Kant’s

metaphysical overtones, with a naturalism that depurates its Aristotelian overtones in light

of contemporary natural science (as Johanna Seibt and Manuel DeLanda continue to

emphasize) remains one of the most distinct facets of Sellars’ work, i.e. the attempt to

reconcile transcendental philosophy with a kind of naturalism, thereby interrupting the

anthropocentrism to which the former had been hitherto delivered. In particular, this last

aspect of the Sellarsian project – arguably the idea around which his entire work revolves –

constitutes the promise for an analytic metaphysics and ontology that is no longer hostage

to the ‘substantialist’ approaches that would have, in Heidegger’s eye, made it the

accomplice to the kind of ontotheological prejudices incubated since Plato and Aristotle’s

equation of being with ousia, passed through the centuries unquestioningly. Gesturing

towards Sellars and Whitehead’s visionary approaches in this regard, Johanna Seibt writes:

20th analytical ontology did not succeed in overcoming the traditional preoccupation with ‘static’ entities, despite its scientific orientations and despite scientific developments (relativity theory, quantum physics) suggesting the primacy of processes or events. Since the formal tools of analytical ontology, such as the predicate calculus, are standardly interpreted over a domain of substance-like “objects,” 20th century ontological research—with few exceptions noted below—has even reinforced the topical and theoretical bias of the tradition. Only most recently analytical ontologists have begun to explore the idea that an


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ontological scheme could postulate that dynamic entities are entities in their own right or even are basic entities in terms of which the familiar notions of ‘static’ types of beings (things, persons, facts etc.) may be defined21.

However controversial Sellars’ commitment to naturalism and scientific realism

may be – and consequently that of those ‘right-Sellarsians’ who follow this aspect of his

work - it is important to notice the scope of its ambition as potentially interrupting the

choice between dogmatic materialism and a transcendental idealism. It is with this dual

task in mind that, I believe, we can move towards a third, post-revisionary stage, sighting

an appropriation of the critical method that at once depurates the metaphysical

conservatism laden in the Kantian edifice, rejoining it to contemporary science, while

salvaging the methodological and epistemological scruples that provided a critical bulwark

against dogmatic metaphysics.

Yes, Kantian epistemology was already metaphysically contaminated. But should it

follow from this that epistemology must be without exception laden by dogmatic

assumptions? Or is it possible to think of an epistemology depurated from its metaphysical

prejudices, as necessarily propaedeutic to ontological speculation? Yes, Kantian

epistemology and its subsequent radicalization in the Continental tradition exacerbated

anthropocentrism and the myopia of thought in relation to the expanses of a cosmos

indifferent to our interests. But should it follow from this that every epistemology must,

necessarily, be destined to anthropocentrism, trapped to the confines of thought, ideas or

appearances? Or is it possible to resist the anti-realist fate assigned to epistemology and to

say, instead, that it is possible to reconcile critique with a realism through which we would

understand the conditions of possibility for thought insofar as it represents a reality

foreign to itself? Yes, the hermeneutic and deconstructive enquiry into the history of

Western metaphysics reveals the lingering reduction of being to presence as substance

which initiates the ‘ontotheological’ derail. But does it follow than every metaphysical

attempt will be destined to such ‘essentialism’, or that it must forever indulge in a

metaphysics of presence impervious to the problematic of time? Or is it possible to reject

21 Seibt, Johanna, Process Ontology, Published in Metafisica e Ontologia, ed. G. Imaguire Verlag, Munchen, 2005, pp. 1-2.


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the Platonist and Aristotelian hypostasis of substance and of essence, in sight of a future

metaphysics within which process and dynamicity are inherent to the thought of being?

Documents

Sellarsian Looks