ionism. We must review this diagnosis of Kant because the nature of McDowell’s direct realism emerges from his providing a very different reading of Kant on this issue. To understand Sellars’ reading of Kant as espousing a form of the given we must again examine the relationship between intuition and the judgment. As we know, intuitive episodes can be entertained without one making judgments. H...

Arthur Wilfrid Adams died on 9th December, 1974, aged 82 years. He was a Bristolian, the son of Avery Adams, who was for many years Secretary to Bristol Education Committee and a well known local artist. Wiilfrid was educated at Clifton College and then studied medicine lin Bristol and at 'the London Hospital qualifying M.B., BjS. (London) in 1916. After service with (the RAMC 'in the First Wor...

W ilfrid Sellars spoke of section 59 of his classic paper, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (Sellars 1997, first published as Sellars 1956), as the denouement of the myth of Jones, the story about "bur Rylean ancestors" (1997, p. 90) that occupies the last part of that paper. Sellars's myth aims to show humans limited to a language with a vocabulary that speaks of "public properties of p...

In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate the structure of Sellars’ critical direct realism in the philosophy of perception. This position is original because it attempts to balance two claims that many have thought to be incompatible: (1) that perceptual knowledge is direct, i.e., not inferential, and (2) that perceptual knowledge is irreducibly conceptual. Even though perceptual episodes are no...

This paper develops and defends a coherentist account of reasons. I develop three core ideas for this defense: a distinction between basic reasons and noninferential justification, the plausibility of the neglected argument against first philosophy, and an emergent account of reasons. These three ideas form the backbone for a credible coherentist view of reasons. I work toward this account by f...

This article discusses how inference to the best explanation (IBE) can be justified as a practical meta-argument. It is, firstly, justified as a practical argument insofar as accepting the best explanation as true can be shown to further a specific aim. And because this aim is a discursive one which proponents can rationally pursue in—and relative to—a complex controversy, namely maximising the...