I had my suspicions while reading Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, but reading Sellars's Autobiographical Reflections confirmed it for me: Sellars is a terrible prose stylist. Sellars complains in the piece about how difficult he found writing for publication, and I can easily believe that it didn't come naturally to him. This essay makes me want to go back and re-read Davidson's Autobiographical Sketch a third time, just to appreciate how pleasant a read it is.
(Holy crap, there's a used copy on Amazon for $36! That is like $90 less than the last one I saw on there, and I haven't seen one on there at all in months! Library of Living Philosophers volume Get. Alibris actually shows a cheaper copy, in hardcover, but the seller doesn't appear to be reliable and I prefer having Amazon back my transaction.)
One thing that leaped out at me from Sellars's autobiographical essay: He specifically notes that he studied everything but ethics to begin with, but one of the central segues in the piece is Sellars's desire to cash out "deontological intuitionism" in naturalistic terms, partly by means of an appropriation of emotivist insights. It's hard to avoid ethics entirely.
I had no idea that Sellars studied under Quine; I had always thought of them as contemporaries. I guess Quine did start teaching when he was pretty young; he's only Davidon's senior by nine years.
04 November 2008
An Observation
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6 comments:
I didn't realize Sellars had studied under Quine either. I'm still surprised at how little Quine and Sellars engaged each other in print, especially since they both responded to Carnap so much. I think I've seen only one article by each in which the other is mentioned. Possibly Sellars's time under Quine convinced him that there was too much distance between them to make criticism constructive. No clue.
The bit about Sellars avoiding ethics is interesting since normativity features so prominently in Sellars's overall view.
A cat hunting a bird understands spatiotemporality, and, arguably, it understands causation (as do any higher order mammals, if not most animals); when it catches the bird, doesn't it show some awareness of basic physics, velocity, force, inertia, etc? It would seem so. So do cats possess/partake in/connect with a synthetic a priori? It would seem so.
Shawn: What are the places where Quine mentions Sellars and vice-versa, if you can recall? I'm guessing they're just passing remarks? (I vaguely recall Quine mentioning Sellars in a footnote somewhere, offhand.)
Another place it occurs to me that Sellars and Quine would have contact is that they're both students of C.I. Lewis. Which makes their mutual ignoring even odder.
They engage in more than a passing manner. In a few places Quine does cite Sellars for something or other.
Sellars has a piece in Words and Objections (which was almost the name of my blog, till I found out that it was the name of that collection) and Quine has a reply. Quine has a piece entitled "Sellars on Behaviorism, Language, and Meaning" in the Jan. 1980 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Sellars has a reply to Quine on something in Synthese vol. 26. I expect that Sellars has an article responding to Quine on the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, but I'm not sure what it would be called.
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