The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.

Formal implication is usually represented by symbolization such as ‘ φx ⊃ Ψx,’ which may be read, “for all values of ‘x’, φx implies Ψx.” If the values of the variable ‘x’, in ‘φx’ and ‘Ψx’ be ‘x1’ ‘x2’ ‘x3’, etc., then … ‘φx’ formally implies ‘Ψx’ if and only if, whatever values of ‘x’, ‘xn’, be chosen, ‘φxn’ materially implies ‘Ψxn’ …However, this still leaves it doubtful which of two possible interpretations of expressions having the form ‘ φx ⊃ (...) Ψx’ is to be taken as correct. … It means one thing to say, “Every existent having the property φ … has also the property Ψ,” and it means quite a different thing to say, “Every thinkable thing which should have the property φ must also have the property Ψ.” The second of these holds only when having the properly φ logically entails having the property Ψ; when ‘Ψx’ is deductible from ‘φx’. … The first of them, however, holds not only in such cases … but also in every case where among existent things, one property is universally accompanied by another. (shrink)

There is a well-known tension within Sellars' scheme arising from commitments to both an anti-foundationalist epistemology and a Peircean scientific realism. This tension surfaces conspicuously in his treatment of ontological category theory. On the one hand, Sellars applies and extends Carnap's metalinguistic deflation of ontology. On the other hand, however, Sellars is not prepared to 'go conventionalist' but upholds the possibility of a "positive ontology" (Rosenberg). I offer a new reading of Sellars’ Carus Lectures in which I combine two projects. (...) First, I argue that Sellars provides us here with the sketch of a method of ‘category projection’ which can be used, within the setting of Sellars' scheme, to 'transcend from within' the limitations of category theories developed in non-Peircean conceptual structures and to enable us non-Peirceans to make any justifiable descriptive claims about the structure of reality. In the course of doing so I also offer a new reading of Sellars' Carus Lectures, highlighting the systematic advantages that motivated Sellars to view a process ontological interpretation of sensation. (shrink)

Sellars’s views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well-understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. The ground that they cover is, after all, familiar—from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, from “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, and from the ensuing debates with Cornman and (...) with Firth. One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong. (shrink)

überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

The problem for Sellars here, as in many earlier papers, can be crudely but vividly summarized as follows: it seems that science has taught us that everything is some collection or other of atoms, and atoms are not colored. Hence nothing is colored; hence nothing is yellow. Shocking! Where did the yellow go? Sellars has for years been wondering where the yellow went, in a series of intricate, patient, metaphysically bold but argumentatively shrewd papers, and in his third Carus Lecture (...) we can see the strands of doctrine woven into a single cable. Along the way Sellars explores a wide variety of imaginable ways of rejecting, revising, or adjusting the premises of the crudely expressed argument above. Might we deny that everything is some collection or other of atoms? Yes, in several different ways. Might we claim that a collection of colorless atoms could be colored? Yes, in several different ways. Sellars surveys the smorgasbord of views and eliminates all but one, which he advances tentatively, not surprisingly, since it is metaphysically extravagant: an “ontology of absolute processes” among which are absolute sensory processes, such as E-flattings and reddings, which are not analyzable at all into the aggregate doings of particulate objects. (shrink)

The problem for Sellars here, as in many earlier papers, can be crudely but vividly summarized as follows: it seems that science has taught us that everything is some collection or other of atoms, and atoms are not colored. Hence nothing is colored; hence nothing is yellow. Shocking! Where did the yellow go? Sellars has for years been wondering where the yellow went, in a series of intricate, patient, metaphysically bold but argumentatively shrewd papers, and in his third Carus Lecture (...) we can see the strands of doctrine woven into a single cable. Along the way Sellars explores a wide variety of imaginable ways of rejecting, revising, or adjusting the premises of the crudely expressed argument above. Might we deny that everything is some collection or other of atoms? Yes, in several different ways. Might we claim that a collection of colorless atoms could be colored? Yes, in several different ways. Sellars surveys the smorgasbord of views and eliminates all but one, which he advances tentatively, not surprisingly, since it is metaphysically extravagant: an “ontology of absolute processes” among which are absolute sensory processes, such as E-flattings and reddings, which are not analyzable at all into the aggregate doings of particulate objects. (shrink)

1. It is an interesting fact that much of the literature on the so-called mind-body problem concerns the relation between sensations—and, in particular, the sensation of pain—and bodily states as in principle describable by the natural sciences.