Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes

by Wilfrid Sellars

Science and Metaphysics contains Sellars' John Locke Lectures. Besides considerable attention to doctrines of Kant's, Sellars presents "in systematic form the views I have developed and modified in paper after paper over the past twenty years."

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 - July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the noted Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at Michigan, the University of Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology, but his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. He was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.

Robert Brandom, his junior colleague at Pittsburgh, named Sellars and Willard van Orman Quine as the two most profound and important philosophers of their generation. Sellars' goal of a synoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the "Pittsburgh School", whose members include Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland. Other philosophers strongly influenced by Sellars span the full spectrum of contemporary English-speaking philosophy, from neopragmatism (Richard Rorty) to eliminative materialism (Paul Churchland) to rationalism (Laurence BonJour). Sellars' philosophical heirs also include Hector-Neri Castaneda, Bruce Aune, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Andrew Chrucky, Jeffrey Sicha, Pedro Amaral, Thomas Vinci, Willem de Vries, Timm Triplett, and Michael Williams.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gets two stars from me because I will probably have to go through it for the second time to even begin to appreciate the nuances of Sellars' attempt to 'naturalize' Kant. Sellars begins with the contention that Kant himself misrecognized the fact that what is intuited are "this-suches" (e.g. redrectangular) which, while not actually discursive (i.e. having sorted stuff into "kinds"), nonetheless exist in the twilight zone between reception and spontaneity. In a rub, the crucial Sellarsian twist is to construe the representings and non-representings (whether conceptual or nonconceptual) as grounded in the an sich or in-itself by virtue of certain POSITIVE features possessed by the latter that are ANALOGOUS to but not IDENTICAL with the phenomenal features of empirical things. To some this strategy might come across as a heretical reworking of the Kantian interdiction on the knowability (not just thinkability) of the in-itself--

"[...] the use of analogy in theoretical science, unlike that in theology, generates new determinate concepts. It does not merely indirectly specify unknown attributes by an 'analogy of proportion'. One might put this by saying that the conceptual structures of theoretical science give us new ways of schematizing categories "

The middle section is extremely dense as Sellars tries to tackle a variant of the problem of universals in which f-ness (e.g triangularity) appears to be 'in' representings of f things in a quite a different sense than it is 'in' f things (e.g. representings themselves cannot literally be triangular). Unfortunately, I could barely scratch the surface of the discussion that ensues.

The final section is surprisingly very straightforward. Sellars goes through some pitfalls we might encounter in our common sense intention talk, distinguishing between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives (i.e. merely valid vs valid AND good arguments) and thankfully for the wearied reader, without reinventing the Kantian wheel.

I wouldn't recommend this book as a good introduction to Sellars unless you are a masochist.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've currently read all but the last chapter, which, it appears, goes in somewhat of a different direction from the rest of the book. Although it's a fair bit more difficult than Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, I think I prefer it. In many ways it resembles Michael Friedman's The Dynamics of Reason, which also presents a convergent realist account of scientific theory change by way of Kant. Really, the parallels are quite striking, at least to my eye. Most of the philosophy of language stuff, however, went over my head, barring the rare moment where all of the technical terminology would coalesce into one or two paragraphs of real clarity.

But, my god, Sellars needs to learn how to signpost his stuff. So many times I'd have no idea what the argument even was, or he'd "reintroduce" ideas that, to my knowledge, hadn't even been brought up yet. Particularly bad was the introduction, in chapter 6, of "French quotation marks", which are meant to play a distinct role from the "dot quotation" syntax being used for the majority of the text—in reference to the relationship between mental representation, on the one hand, and "standing for", on the other, even though it seemed to me that we had already discussed this distinction without recourse to the bifurcated quotation system??? Truly baffling. And yet, at the same time, extremely thought provoking and wonderful. Read at your own risk.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah but who would be the buyars?