Monday, December 19, 2016

Wilfrid Sellars on the Myth of the Given (Part One, Podcast audio)


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Episode 154: Wilfrid Sellars on the Myth of the Given (Part One)
// The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). Is knowledge based on a "foundation," as Descartes, Locke, et al. thought? Sellars says no: The allegedly basic elements upon which knowledge would be built either have to be propositions, in which case they involve a lot of prior knowledge involved in language use and so aren't really basic, or they're "raw feelings," in which case they can't actually serve as reasons for anything; reasons have to be propositional.