Una ruta de Kant a Hegel. Destino: ¿McDowell?

El presente artículo trata sobre la relación entre el pensamiento de John McDowell y la obra de Hegel. La idea fundamental es exponer la línea argumental que va, en el marco de la filosofía analítica, desde una posición kantiana a una hegeliana. El punto clave se sitúa en la lectura de la deducción de las categorías vista a la luz de la crítica de Wilfrid Sellars al mito de lo dado. A partir de ahí, el objetivo es discutir si esta ruta de Kant a Hegel tiene como destino la filosofía de McDowell contrastando la filosofía de estos dos últimos: repensar el concepto de idealismo y la relación entre experiencia y filosofía desde ambos autores, Hegel y McDowell, tanto en sus similitudes como en sus discrepancias.

Metaphysics

A discussion of the inevitability of metaphysics centered on the question, how are the appearances related to reality? The universe as we encounter it in our everyday and scientific pursuits, what Wilfrid Sellars called the ‘manifest image’, presents itself as strikingly at odds with the ‘scientific image’, the universe as revealed by physics. Every reflective agent must eventually confront the problem of how the manifest and scientific images are related, how the appearances stand to reality. Three responses to the problem are discussed, and a fourth is introduced. A holistic conception of metaphysics—a ‘package deal’—is endorsed, two competing worldviews, ‘Aristotelianism’ and ‘Humeanism’ are set out, followed by brief chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book’s contents.

Appearance in Reality

Appearance in Reality addresses topics in fundamental metaphysics, extending positions developed in From and Ontological Point of View (2003) and The Universe as We Find It (2012). This is not simply ‘Part III’ of a three-part project, however. The book takes what readers familiar with those earlier volumes would likely regard as a surprising turn, finding common ground between divergent ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Humean’ cosmologies in Spinoza. The book includes considerable new and newly framed material on essences, universals, relations, emergence, hylomorphism, modality, conscious experiences, free will, and related topics. A substance–property ontology is proposed, one in which properties are not universals, but modes, particular modifications of particular substances. The ontology is meant to be consistent with both atomistic and non-atomistic cosmologies, or with whatever cosmology physics eventually settles on. One of the book’s unifying themes concerns the problem of reconciling what Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest and scientific images. The aim is to understand how the appearances comport with our best guess as to the nature of reality. The question of the relation of appearance to reality has always been central to metaphysics, but it is one faced by any reflective agent. Its unavoidability drives metaphysics. Far from being an idle pastime, metaphysics is not optional.

The Scientific Weltanschauung: (Anti-)naturalism in Dilthey, Jaspers and Analytic Philosophy

Different forms of methodological and ontological naturalism constitute the current near-orthodoxy in analytic philosophy. Many prominent figures have called naturalism a (scientific) image (Sellars, W. 1962. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” In Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, Reality, 1–40. Ridgeview Publishing), a Weltanschauung (Loewer, B. 2001. “From Physics to Physicalism.” In Physicalism and its Discontents, edited by C. Gillett, and B. Loewer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Stoljar, D. 2010. Physicalism. Routledge), or even a “philosophical ideology” (Kim, J. 2003. “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism.” Journal of Philosophical Research 28: 83–98). This suggests that naturalism is indeed something over-and-above an ordinary philosophical thesis (e.g. in contrast to the justified true belief-theory of knowledge). However, these thinkers fail to tease out the host of implications this idea – naturalism being a worldview – presents. This paper draws on (somewhat underappreciated) remarks of Dilthey and Jaspers on the concept of worldviews (Weltanschauung, Weltbild) in order to demonstrate that naturalism as a worldview is a presuppositional background assumption which is left untouched by arguments against naturalism as a thesis. The concluding plea is (in order to make dialectical progress) to re-organize the existing debate on naturalism in a way that treats naturalism not as a first-order philosophical claim, but rather shifts its focus on naturalism’s status as a worldview.

Butler and Postanalytic Philosophy

This article has two aims: (i) to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and (ii) to argue that Butler's poststructuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given her pragmatic parallel with Sellars's critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to (i), I argue that Butler's objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from a definition of woman to what one may call poststructuralist sites of woman parallels moving away from a definition of knowledge to a pragmatic account of knowledge as a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons. With regard to (ii), I argue that the important parallels between Butler's poststructuralist feminism and Sellars's antirepresentationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her poststructuralist feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy. This article starts a conversation between two philosophers whom the literature has yet to fully introduce to each other.

Schlick and Sellars on Observational Knowledge

"The aim of the present paper is to provide a comparative account of the manner in which Moritz Schlick and Wilfrid Sellars treat certain aspects surrounding the topic of observational knowledge. By considering Sellars’s allusions to Schlick’s epistemological undertaking within the context of his rejection of givenness, I evaluate the extent to which Schlick can be characterized as a traditional foundationalist. By emphasizing that this is not the case and that Schlick adheres to a non-standard version of epistemological foundationalism, I shed some light on those theoretical elements that allow for a convergence of opinions between the two authors to transpire. Keywords: Schlick, Sellars, confirmations, the Given, observation reports "

Science and the Pragmatist Image of Humanity: Lessons from Wilfrid Sellars and Beyond

The paper focuses on the pragmatist image of humanity based on a re-reading of the philosophical “manifesto” of Wilfrid Sellars (1963) in which he became entangled in the dichotomy between “scientific” and “manifest” images. The key to solving this problem, according to the author, is the new pragmatist understanding of science as a cultural practice, which provide us with a new framework for transcending this dichotomy. By reconstructing Sellars in an anthropological rather than a scientistic way and by drawing on humanistic philosophical intentions that are present both in pragmatism and in Sellars, it becomes possible to outline a concept of “science with a human face.” The purpose of all kinds of images, including scientific ones, is to serve the enrichment of human understanding and life.

Pragmatism and Verbal Behaviourism. Mead’s and Sellars’ Theories of Meaning and Introspection

The article highlights George Herbert Mead’s and Wilfrid Sellars’ reliance on a behaviourally-grounded conception of meaning as strictly related to the possibility of distinguishing mental from non-mental phenomena as both related to the semantic dimension. Mead’s position is in fact akin to Wilfrid Sellars’ argument that the concepts of ‘inner events’ are essentially inter-subjective. Thoughts are displayed as consisting of related linguistic acts linked inferentially through intra-linguistic moves that respond to a particular ‘language practice’ governed by norms. Introspection is an ‘inner conversation’ (Mead), namely an ‘inner’ speaking analogous to linguistic activity that does not involve actual equivalents of the words in the mind (Sellars).

Knowledge Guaranteed

What is the relationship between saying ‘I know that Q’ and guaranteeing that Q? John Austin, Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars all agreed that there is some important connection, but disagreed over what exactly it was. In this paper I discuss each of their accounts and present a new one of my own. Drawing on speech-act theory and recent research on the epistemic norms of speech acts, I suggest that the relationship is this: by saying ‘I know that Q’, you represent yourself as having the authority to guarantee that Q.