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

2015

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 OShea 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 Kants 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 nondogmatic 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
OShea 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

OShea, 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 ontotheology2.
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.

See in particular Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
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On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at The Analytic-Continental Divide Daniel Sacilotto

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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 sciences5. 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 phase6. 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 naivet 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
Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1981.
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 philosophys 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
Kants own attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge through a resolutely nonepistemological, but rather existential and pragmatic kind of fundamental ontology, for

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 philosophys 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 Heideggers history of being (Geschichte des Seins)
leading to the assault on ontotheology, to Gadamers reconstruction of the hermeneutic
method and artistic truth, to Derridas deconstruction of logocentrism against metaphysics
of presence, to Adornos assault on instrumental reason, to Foucaults 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 postphilosophical 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 Foucaults term), progressively revealing further
prejudices in the philosophical text, pushing critique towards the limit of self-reflexivity,
even calling philosophys rights to exist into question. It is not surprise then to see that
Rortys 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 postKantian 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
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
Heideggers 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 Kants 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

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 Kants
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
The two canonical texts in this regard remain in my estimation Heideggers The Question Concerning
Technology, and Adorno and Horkheimers 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 counterrevolution 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
Kants 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.

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.
12

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.

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 antirealism 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

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. Heideggers account of Daseins pre-ontological understanding of being, which
includes the pragmatic disclosure of the world of tools (Zeug) or the ready-to-hand

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.

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

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 OShea 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

OShea, James, Naturalism With a Normative Turn.

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

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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 Kants
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 Heideggers eye, made it the
accomplice to the kind of ontotheological prejudices incubated since Plato and Aristotles
equation of being with ousia, passed through the centuries unquestioningly. Gesturing
towards Sellars and Whiteheads 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
researchwith few exceptions noted belowhas
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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On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at The Analytic-Continental Divide Daniel Sacilotto

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

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

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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?

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