Having the World in View - Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars

Oct 28, 2026

A collection of essays examining Wilfrid Sellars’s deeply Kantian account of perceptual experience and its relation to Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. The work analyzes whether perceptual “givenness” supports the Myth of the Given, how sensory consciousness is constrained or informed by conceptual capacities, and how external constraint and “sheer receptivity” should be understood. It also develops interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology, including themes such as the Master/Slave dialectic and the role of apperception in agency, concluding with Sellarsian topics including rationality, empiricism of mind, and avoiding given-structured myths.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages159

Reading Time4 h 5 min

AccessFree to download

Preface

Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality

Kantian Themes in Hegel and Sellars

Reading Hegel

Sellarsian Themes

HAVING THEWORLD IN VIEW ESSAYS ON KANT,HEGEL。AND SELLARSJOHN McDOWELL Having the Worldin View Essays on Kant,Hegel,and Sellars Copyright ◎2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDowell,John Henry. Having the world in view;essays on Kant,Hegel,and Sellars /John McDowell. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references(p.)and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03165-4(alk.paper) 1.Kant,Immanuel,1724-1804.2.Hegel,Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,1770-1831. 3.Sellars,Wilfrid.I.Title.B2798.M42352009190—dc222008013843 Contents Preface vii I Sellars,Kant,and Intentionality 1 Sellars on Perceptual Experience 32 The Logical Form of an Intuition 233 Intentionality as a Relation 44 Ⅱ Kantian Themes in Hegel and Sellars 4 Hegel's Idealism as Radicalization of Kant 69 5 Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint 90 6 Sensory Consciousness in Kant and Sellars 108 7 Conceptual Capacities in Perception 127 III Reading Hegel 8 The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of“Lordship and Bondage”in Hegel's Phenomenology 147 9 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the“Reason”Chapter of the Phenomenology 166 10 On Pippin's Postscript 185 vi Contents # IV Sellarsian Themes 11 The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality:Davidson and Sellars207 12 Why Is Sellars's Essay Called“Empiricism and thePhilosophy of Mind"? 221 13 Sellars's Thomism 239 14 Avoiding the Myth of the Given 256 Bibliography 275Credits 281Index 283 # Preface The title of this collection is the title under which I presented versions of theessays in PartIas the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University in 1997. Those essays appear here under what I used as the subtitle of those lec-tures.Their topic is Wilfrid Sellars's deeply Kantian account of perceptualexperience.In the experience of rational subjects,things are given to themto be known,in knowledge of a kind only rational subjects can have,knowledge that is a standing in the space of reasons.Is this givenness a caseof what Sellars rejects as the Myth of the Given?No,but that is only be-cause the experience of rational subjects,experience in which things aregiven for rational knowledge,itself draws on capacities that belong to therational intellect,the understanding. Even as enjoyed by rational subjects,perceptual experience involves sen-sibility.And sensibility is not peculiar to rational subjects.As Sellars inter-prets what a Kantian account would require,sensibility constrains the in-volvement of the understanding in experience from outside.I contrast thatwith a conception according to which the role of sensibility in a Kantian ac-count is that it is sensory consciousness that is informed by conceptual ca-pacities in the experience of rational subjects.When I wrote the essays inPart I,I thought Sellars's picture included this informing of sensory con-sciousness by capacities that belong to the understanding,and that he addedexternal constraint,by what he calls"sheer receptivity",as a distinct furtherrole for sensibility.I retract that reading of Sellars in Essay 6.(Readersshould be alert to what this is an instance of:I would not now affirm every-thing on every page of this collection.) Sellars holds that it is not as possessors of significance that words bear re-lations to elements in extra-linguistic reality.In Essay 3 I discuss how thisdoctrine,which I think we should reject,conspires with other features of Sellars's thinking to make the contrasting conception of the role of sensi-bility invisible to him. If,as I recommend,we deny that the rational intellect needs a certain sortof external constraint,even in its empirical operations,we are soundingwhat can be easily heard as a Hegelian note.In Essays 2 and 3 I make someremarks about the Hegelian character of the denial,and that is the centraltopic of the first two essa

FAQs

What central issue does the collection address regarding perceptual experience?

It evaluates Sellars’s Kantian account of how rational subjects know, focusing on whether perceptual experience involves something like “givenness” that would amount to the Myth of the Given.

How does the author relate sensibility to the understanding in a Kantian account?

The essays contrast an external-constraint view with an alternative where sensory consciousness is informed by conceptual capacities, and later revise the author’s earlier reading of Sellars on this point.

Which Hegel texts and themes are interpreted in these essays?

The collection includes readings of parts of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, such as the Master/Slave dialectic, the apperceptive I versus the empirical self, and questions about action and agency.

Oct 28, 2026

Upload by Quinn Holloway