Mission accomplished?

What was Bas’ mission?

Not the doctrines — constructive empiricism, the modal interpretation, the semantic view, voluntarist epistemology.

Those are the outputs. The mission was something else:

to make a space in which human beings can do science as human beings.

The big mission: a space of reasons

Harald Høffding helped create the intellectual culture in which Niels Bohr was possible.

This is Bas’s mission too: a space of reasons — to borrow Sellars’ own term — in which human beings can flourish: intellectually, creatively, scientifically.

I do not think we need new theories in philosophy. But … we must change, or change back, the way we do philosophy — in aid of an authentic, engaged project, conscious of its own limits.

Outline

1. Sellars’ problematic
2. van Fraassen: challenge accepted
3. The Danish road
4. Er musste das Wissen aufheben

Pittsburgh, circa 1963

the problematic of a philosophical career is set

Sellars “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”

The philosopher, then, is confronted by two conceptions … of man-in-the-world and he cannot shirk the attempt to see how they fall together in one stereoscopic view.

The two images, felt

I cannot help experiencing time as flowing — the present as real, the future as open.

Special relativity appears to have no place for either: no absolute present, no flow.

Putnam: past and future are as real as the present. The manifest “now” — an illusion?

Sellars “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”

I have characterized the manifest image of man-in-the-world as the framework in which man encountered himself.

What I have referred to as the ‘scientific’ image of man-in-the-world and contrasted with the ‘manifest’ image, might better be called the ‘postulational’ or ‘theoretical’ image.

The Perennial Philosophy

… the manifest image endorsed as real, and its outline taken to be the large-scale map of reality to which science brings a needle-point of detail and an elaborate technique of map-reading.

I am implying that the perennial philosophy is analogous to what one gets when one looks through a stereoscope with one eye dominating.

Against the Perennial Philosophy

I seem, therefore, to be saying … that man is not the sort of thing he conceives himself to be; that his existence is in some measure built around error. … One thinks, for example, of Spinoza, who contrasted man as he falsely conceives himself to be with man as he discovers himself to be in the scientific enterprise.

Sellars’ Ambiguity

… the very fact that I use the analogy of stereoscopic vision implies that as I see it the manifest image is not overwhelmed.

… the first, which, like a child, says ‘both’, is ruled out by a principle which I am not defending in this chapter.

Not overwhelmed — yet ‘both’ is ruled out. Which is it?

Closing the circle

“Let the scientific image account for everything — including the describer who produced it.”

One mission, many names: reduction → supervenience → grounding

Not a drop of existentialism — the self always comes second to the system.

A mission one may choose, as Bas chose another.

Closing the circle: the programs

In physics:

measurement problem — remove the observer from the quantum axioms · the Mentaculus — the world from one probability distribution · Lewis — everything on the Humean mosaic · Field — science without numbers

In philosophy of mind:

Quine — epistemology naturalized · Churchland — the self as folk theory, ripe for elimination · Dennett — the first person redescribed from the third

the same mission, on two fronts

Pittsburgh, 1996

McDowell elevates Sellars’ essay to the canon — and dissolves the dilemma: the space of reasons need be neither reduced nor spooky.

The courageous move — and nearly Bas’s own.

But then the coda: “…a naturalism of second nature.”

To invoke second nature is to promise grounding in first nature — the reduction deferred, not refused. The courage is taken back.

Responses to Sellars’ problem

Responses to Sellars’ problem

“The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image”

there is something much more fundamentally wrong with the entire dialectic — there are no such things as the Manifest and Scientific Images at all

the Scientific Image is as replete with uncashed and ultimately uncashable promissory notes as the Manifest Image

The Empirical Stance (2002)