Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision

ISBN-13: 9783031270253 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Dionysis Christias

Opis

This book brings together the work of Wilfrid Sellars with work in 20th century phenomenology and 21st century speculative realism in order to think through one of the most important predicaments of contemporary philosophy. As a result of the disenchantment of nature in late modernity, philosophy has struggled to account for the place of persons, construed as loci of normative authority and responsibility, within a scientifically, naturalistically described world, bereft of values and norms. The book argues that Sellars takes both the framework of persons and science seriously and thinks that this implies the need not just for reconciling the manifest and scientific images but for fusing them into one stereoscopic vision of reality and our place in it. One of the main aims of this book is to address the issue of the form which a non-alienated experience of ourselves-in-the-world would take in the Sellarsian cryptic stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image. Through an extended discussion of Sellars’ relevance for contemporary continental philosophy and phenomenology, in which his views on perception, the commonsense ‘lifeworld’, science, normativity, personhood, morality and process metaphysics are presented and extended, the book sketches a novel view about what a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and the scientific image would amount to at the level of our lifeworld experience.

Spis treści

1. Introduction

2. Prelude: Sellars’ Project and Its Essential Tension

Part I Sellars and Phenomenology: Lifeworld and Science

3. Husserl’s Lifeworld and the Scientific Image

4. Lifeworld Phenomenology After Husserl: Merleau-Ponty, Enactivism, Heiddeger and Science

5. Toward a Non-representational Conception of Science and the Lifeworld

Part II Sellars’ Relevance for Continental Philosophy

6. Toward the Thing-in-Itself: Sellars’ and Meillassoux’s Divergent Conception of Kantian Transcendentalism

7. Deleuze and Sellars on Ontology and Normativity

Part III Unifying the Manifest and the Scientific Images

8. Sellars’ Synoptic Vision: Unifying the Images at the Level of the Lifeworld

Part IV Persons, Free Will and Processes

9. Persons as Normative Functions in a Nominalistic Process World

10. Free Will in a Scientifically Disenchanted World

Part V Philosophy, Disenchantment and Self-Critique

11. The Dialectic Between Manifest and Scientific Image in the Wake of Weberian Disenchantment

Part VI Scientific Naturalism and Non-instrumental Values

12. Science and the Objectification of Values: A Sellarsian Response to the Continental Critique of Science

O autorze

Dionysis Christias is Research Associate Professor at the Research Center for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens. He is also the Research Director of a 3-year funded research project entitled: The Philosophical Implications of Cognitive Neuroscience: Overcoming the Representation Wars. He received his Ph.D. from University of Athens in 2010.