James O'Shea
* SEE THE WEBSITE VERSION LINKED JUST BELOW (then click 'Research'):
I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992 (Problems of Substance: Perception and Object in Hume and Kant), with supervisors Jay F. Rosenberg and Simon Blackburn. Since 1992 I have been a lecturer and then Professor in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD). I am also Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Treasurer of the cross-border Irish Philosophical Club. In addition to my continuing work on systematic issues in the philosophies of Kant and Hume, I am also working on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and perceptual epistemology concerning naturalism and normativity (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell), as well as on American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism.
I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992 (Problems of Substance: Perception and Object in Hume and Kant), with supervisors Jay F. Rosenberg and Simon Blackburn. Since 1992 I have been a lecturer and then Professor in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD). I am also Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Treasurer of the cross-border Irish Philosophical Club. In addition to my continuing work on systematic issues in the philosophies of Kant and Hume, I am also working on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and perceptual epistemology concerning naturalism and normativity (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell), as well as on American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism.
less
InterestsView All (20)
Uploads
MY BOOKS
(James R. O’Shea is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (2007) and _Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: An Introduction and Interpretation_ (2012), and the editor of _Sellars and His Legacy_ (2016).
Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief sketch of Kant’s life and the historical context 1
Approaching the text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11
1 METAPHYSICS AND THE “FIERY TEST OF CRITIQUE” 13
1.1 Rational metaphysics: the highest aims of speculative reason 13
1.2 ‘Appearances’ versus ‘things in themselves’: Kant’s
transcendental idealism 26
2 WAKING FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS: HUME AND
THE ANTINOMIES 40
2.1 Hume’s scepticism and the problem of synthetic a priori
judgments
2.2 The Antinomies of Pure Reason 50
2.3 Elusive totalities and the interests of reason: Kant’s critical
solution 62
3 SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY 78
3.1 Space and time as pure forms of sensory intuition 82
3.2 Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism concerning space
and time 97
3.3 ! e problem of aff ection and ‘things in themselves’ 106
CONTENTS
viii
4 THE CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE
THINKING SELF 116
4.1 Conceptual thinking: the categories as a priori forms
of understanding 116
4.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 132
5 ONE LAWFUL NATURE 158
5.1 Applying categories to the world in the Principles of Pure
Understanding 158
5.2 Substance and causality, self and nature: a metaphysics
of experience 173
6 CONCLUSION: PURE REASON’S ROLE IN KANT’S METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE 205
6.1 Clipping the wings of pure speculative reason 205
6.2 Kant’s critique of speculative theology in “! e Ideal of Pure
Reason” 207
6.3 The validity of pure reason’s immanent regulative principles 214
Bibliography 225
Index 231
-CONTENTS of the volume:
Introduction 1
1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10
The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and
scientifi c images 10
The clash of the images and the status of the sensible
qualities 14
Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical
systems? 17
2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23
Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c
theories 24
Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c
realism 32
The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41
3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48
Approaching thought through language: is meaning a
relation? 49
Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55
The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’
nominalism 63
Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the
metalinguistic account 69
4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77
Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77
Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the
space of meanings 83
Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner
thoughts 86
Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of
thinking 97
5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the
Given 106
The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107
Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118
Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our
knowledge 125
Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our
sensory experiences 136
6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143
Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144
Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147
Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158
The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute
processes 163
7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative
Turn 176
The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176
Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178
Persons in the synoptic vision 185
Notes 191
Bibliography 228
Index 243
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy: 'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
William G. Lycan: 'Rosenberg on Proper Names'
Douglas Long: 'Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior'
Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green: 'Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning'
David Rosenthal: 'The Mind and Its Expression'
Jeffrey Sicha: 'The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental'
Bruce Aune: 'Rosenberg on Knowing'
Joseph C. Pitt 'Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism'
Matthew Chrisman: 'The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg'
James O'Shea: 'Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide'
Anton Koch: 'Persons as Mirroring the World'
Eric M. Rubenstein: 'Form and Content, Substance and Stuff'
Ralf Stoecker: 'On Being a Realist About Death'
William G. Lycan: 'Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg'
Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg
MY ARTICLES
Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy.
(James R. O’Shea is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (2007) and _Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: An Introduction and Interpretation_ (2012), and the editor of _Sellars and His Legacy_ (2016).
Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 1
A brief sketch of Kant’s life and the historical context 1
Approaching the text of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11
1 METAPHYSICS AND THE “FIERY TEST OF CRITIQUE” 13
1.1 Rational metaphysics: the highest aims of speculative reason 13
1.2 ‘Appearances’ versus ‘things in themselves’: Kant’s
transcendental idealism 26
2 WAKING FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS: HUME AND
THE ANTINOMIES 40
2.1 Hume’s scepticism and the problem of synthetic a priori
judgments
2.2 The Antinomies of Pure Reason 50
2.3 Elusive totalities and the interests of reason: Kant’s critical
solution 62
3 SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY 78
3.1 Space and time as pure forms of sensory intuition 82
3.2 Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism concerning space
and time 97
3.3 ! e problem of aff ection and ‘things in themselves’ 106
CONTENTS
viii
4 THE CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE
THINKING SELF 116
4.1 Conceptual thinking: the categories as a priori forms
of understanding 116
4.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 132
5 ONE LAWFUL NATURE 158
5.1 Applying categories to the world in the Principles of Pure
Understanding 158
5.2 Substance and causality, self and nature: a metaphysics
of experience 173
6 CONCLUSION: PURE REASON’S ROLE IN KANT’S METAPHYSICS
OF NATURE 205
6.1 Clipping the wings of pure speculative reason 205
6.2 Kant’s critique of speculative theology in “! e Ideal of Pure
Reason” 207
6.3 The validity of pure reason’s immanent regulative principles 214
Bibliography 225
Index 231
-CONTENTS of the volume:
Introduction 1
1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10
The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and
scientifi c images 10
The clash of the images and the status of the sensible
qualities 14
Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical
systems? 17
2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23
Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c
theories 24
Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c
realism 32
The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41
3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48
Approaching thought through language: is meaning a
relation? 49
Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55
The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’
nominalism 63
Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the
metalinguistic account 69
4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77
Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77
Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the
space of meanings 83
Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner
thoughts 86
Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of
thinking 97
5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the
Given 106
The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107
Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118
Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our
knowledge 125
Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our
sensory experiences 136
6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143
Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144
Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147
Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158
The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute
processes 163
7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative
Turn 176
The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176
Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178
Persons in the synoptic vision 185
Notes 191
Bibliography 228
Index 243
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy: 'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
William G. Lycan: 'Rosenberg on Proper Names'
Douglas Long: 'Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior'
Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green: 'Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning'
David Rosenthal: 'The Mind and Its Expression'
Jeffrey Sicha: 'The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental'
Bruce Aune: 'Rosenberg on Knowing'
Joseph C. Pitt 'Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism'
Matthew Chrisman: 'The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg'
James O'Shea: 'Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide'
Anton Koch: 'Persons as Mirroring the World'
Eric M. Rubenstein: 'Form and Content, Substance and Stuff'
Ralf Stoecker: 'On Being a Realist About Death'
William G. Lycan: 'Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg'
Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg
Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy.
I begin by introducing Peirce's pragmatic maxim viewed as a test of conceptual clarity that is also broadly reflected in most recognizably pragmatist accounts of meaning and conceptual content (section I). This serves as a lead-in to a selective examination of the tension as it arises in James’s career-long effort to provide a satisfactory account of ‘the cognitive relation’ that obtains between our ideas and their objects, focusing on the case of perceptual experience (section II). In section III the tension is seen as arising in part from a plausible tight connection between the pragmatic maxim and the rejection by pragmatists such as Peirce, Rorty, and Brandom of what Sellars called the ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars, 1956). Finally, however, I conclude in section IV by considering the grounds for the dissatisfaction expressed by many recent pragmatists with the resulting successor conception of experience to be found in Rorty and Brandom, and I offer a brief diagnosis of the tension that points to the general form of a satisfactory solution.