#sellars

[roughridingrednecks]

Sellars

[affirmation--negation]

Now it is obvious that if the esse of possible worlds like the esse of Oliver Twist consists in the fictional discourse about them, we have a new sense in which actuality is prior to possibility - roughly that in which Dickens is prior to Oliver Twist. This accords with Leibniz’ contention that the Divine Understanding is the locus of the possible world. How, then, can he extend the notion of possibility to God Himself? For God is that Being who necessarily exists if He is possible. And God qua possible can scarcely have a being which is dependent on God’s Understanding. I shall limit myself to two points: (1) When Leibniz tells us that the Divine Understanding is the locus of the possible, he seems, in the whole, to have the contingently possible in mind, and to be telling us that the real or proximate possibility of the contingently possible lies in the possibility of its intended Creation, and hence involves a reference to God’s thought of it. This is compatible with an account of possible substances which make them prior to the actuality of God. (2) If my positive argument is correct, the actuality of God as of anything else would presuppose our existence as discoverers of God.  Sellars, “Meditations Leibniziennes.”

[roughridingrednecks]

Sellars in Ohio

[scripps]

Our emotions are the products of judgements we make. Consequently, we are in complete control of our emotions, and responsible for them. The stoic claim is not that we should deny or repress our emotions, it is rather than we should try to avoid having them in the first place. Chrysippus likened having an emotion to running too fast: once you have a certain amount of momentum, you cannot simply stop. Your motion is out of control, and being in the grip of an emotion is very much like this. So, you cannot simply turn off an unwanted emotion at will, but what you can do is try to avoid letting the next one pick up momentum to the point that it becomes out of control.

Lessons in stoicism

[itsmightyfunny]

Linguistically we always operate within a framework of living rules. To talk about rules is to move outside the talked-about rules into another framework of living rules. (The snake which sheds one skin lives within another.) In attempting to grasp rules as rules from without, we are trying to have our cake and eat it. To describe rules is to describe the skeletons of rules. A rule is lived, not described. Thus, what we justify is never a rule, but behavior and dispositions to behave. The "ought" eludes us and we are left with "is." The skeletons of rules can be given a pragmatic or instrumentalist justification. This justification operates within a set of living rules. The death of one rule is the life of another. Even one and the same rule may be both living as justificans and dead as justificandum, as when we justify a rule of logic. Indeed, can the attempt to justify rules, from left to right, be anything but an exhibition of these rules from right to left? To learn new rules is to change one's mind.

Wilfrid Sellars

[itsmightyfunny]

The mode of existence of a rule is as a generalization written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink.

Wilfrid Sellars

[itsmightyfunny]

To make the ethical "ought" into even the second cousin of the "hurrah" of a football fan is completely to miss its significance. If I have become more and more happy of late about Kant's assimilation of the ethical "ought" to the logical and physical "musts," it is because I have increasingly been led to assimilate the logical and physical "musts" to the ethical "ought."

Wilfrid Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior"

[itsmightyfunny]

Thus, if logical and (more broadly) epistemic categories express general features of the ought-to-bes (and corresponding uniformities) which are necessary to the functioning of language as a cognitive instrument, epistemology, in this context, becomes the theory of this functioning – in short transcendental linguistics... It attempts to delineate the general features that would be common to the epistemic functioning of any language in any possible world. As I once put it, epistemology, in the “new way of words,” is the theory of what it is to be a language that is about a world in which it is used...[Kant,] too, seeks the general features any conceptual system must have in order to generate knowledge of a world to which it belongs.

Sellars