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Introduction to Sellars and Quine Pete Mandik Chairman, Department of Philosophy Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory William Paterson University, New Jersey USA

Introduction to Sellars and Quine

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Introduction to Sellars and Quine. Pete Mandik Chairman, Department of Philosophy Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory William Paterson University, New Jersey USA. Two Giants. Wilfrid Sellars 1912-1989 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) Willard van Orman Quine 1908-2000 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: Introduction to Sellars and Quine

Introduction to Sellars and Quine

Pete MandikChairman, Department of PhilosophyCoordinator, Cognitive Science LaboratoryWilliam Paterson University, New Jersey USA

Page 2: Introduction to Sellars and Quine

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Two Giants

Wilfrid Sellars1912-1989Empiricism and the

Philosophy of Mind (1956)

Willard van Orman Quine

1908-2000Word and Object (1960)

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Sellars and Quine vs. PositivismBoth revolutionized analytic philosophy

by opposing Logical Positivism aka Logical Empiricism

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Logical Positivism

“…restated the foundationalist epistemology of British empiricism…” (EPM p.2)

Verifiability Principle- All truths are either analytic (logical tautologies) or synthetic (knowable through sensory perception)

Sense Datum Theory- Everything known by the senses is reducible to constructions of sense data

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Quine

Attacked the Verifiability Principle by attacking the Analytic/synthetic distinction

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Sellars

Attacked Sense Datum Theory by attacking the “Myth of the Given” and the “bad philosophical habit which the British empiricists took over from Descartes--the habit of asking whether the mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact with [the] world, and remaining skeptical about the status of knowledge-claims until such contact can be shown to exist” (EPM p. 9)

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Sellars and the Myth

“Intuitions without concepts are blind.” (EPM p. 3)

“All awareness…is a linguistic affair” (EPM p. 4)

“Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were wrong in thinking that we are ‘aware…simply by having sensations and images’.” (ibid.)

“in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical desription of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (ibid.)

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THE END