'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Sellar's manifest image
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December 23, 2007
I was going through my files the other day and I cam across a reference to Wilfred Sellars ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, where he proposes compelling diagnosis of the predicament of contemporary philosophy that made a lot of sense to me. It is described thus by Ray Brassier in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction:
The contemporary philosopher is confronted by two competing ‘images’ of man in the world: on the one hand, the manifest image of man as he has conceived of himself up until now with the aid of philosophical eflection; on the other, the relatively recent but continually expanding scientific image of man as a ‘complex physical system’... one which is conspicuously unlike the manifest image, but which can
be distilled from various scientific discourses, including physics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, and, more recently, cognitive science. But for Sellars, the contrast between the manifest and the scientific image is not to be construed in terms of a conflict between naive common sense and sophisticated theoretical reason. The manifest image is not the domain of pre-theoretical immediacy. On the contrary, it is itself a subtle theoretical construct, a disciplined and critical ‘refinement or sophistication’ of the originary framework in terms of which man first encountered himself as a being capable of conceptual thought, in contradistinction to creatures who lack this capacity.
for Sellars, the fundamental import of the manifest image is not so much ontological as normative. The manifest image does not so much catalogue a set of indispensable ontological items which we should strive to preserve from scientific reduction; rather, it indexes the community of rational agents.Sellars maintains, the manifest image provides the ineluctable prerequisite for our capacity to identify ourselves as human, which is to say, as persons.
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Gary, You might find this reference interesting.
http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html