Back to Roy Wood Sellars: Why His Evolutionary Naturalism Is Still Worthwhile

Back to Roy Wood Sellars: Why His Evolutionary Naturalism Is Still Worthwhile POUWEL SLURINK 1. INTRODUCTION ATTHE MOMENT,naturalism is fashionable as never before. Several of the most prominent living philosophers--e.g., Quine, Churchland, Ruse--call themselves naturalists. However, it is not always that clear what really is meant by naturalism, apart from a philosophy in which science plays a large role. This lack of clarity stems in part from the uncertainty about what is meant by "science"--physics, biology, or both of them. But partly it also stems from different interpretations of the impact of scientific models on philosophical reflections. In this article I propose a return to the writings of the "evolutionary naturalist" Roy Wood Sellars (July 9, 188o, Seaforth, Ontario-September 5, 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan). He was the father of Wilfrid Sellars, but I think that the philosophy of Sellars pbre is a better starting-point for "a reading programme" for modern naturalists than the philosophy of Sellarsfi/s, in spite of the claim of the latter that "Critical Realism and Evolutionary Naturalism .., and all that they imply, are part of my paternal inheritance."' Although it may be true that much of the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars is rooted in the philosophy of his father, we miss the illuminating evolutionary considerations characteristic of his father's philosophy in most of his work, and we can see a tendency to expect too much from linguistic analyses alone (instead of the more typically naturalistic way of expecting solutions from new perspectives offered by new knowledge). Beyond that, Wilfred Sellars, with his attack on "the Myth of the Given" and his dichotomy between the manifest and the scientific '"PhysicalRealism,"in PhilosophicalPerspectives(Springfield,IL: CharlesThomas, 1967),185. [425] 4~6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 image, although in fact he was only criticizing logical positivism and extending some arguments of his father, probably had the effect of suggesting the hopelessness of realism and naturalism.9 With his painstakingly detailed linguistic analyses of problems, he probably helped to initiate "the linguistic turn" in philosophy and thereby strengthened a movement that kept naturalism in check for at least one generation. Most of the time, however, his analyses are either completely compatible with his father's philosophy, or try to carry it further in specific domains and discussions.3 Given the fact that both father and son tried to take "both science and man seriously,"4 the differences in their work can be explained partly by the completely different philosophical scene in which they were operating. It seems to me, however, that the elder Sellars was more fully alive to the importance of evolution than Wilfrid Sellars . The work of Sellars p~reis the best starting-point for anyone interested in finding a balanced and reasonable version of naturalism in which the epistemological questions raised by the counterintuitive nature of physics, or by the mysterious relations between mind and body and mind and nature, are partly solved by evolutionary considerations about the nature of knowledge and consciousness. In my examination of Roy Wood Sellars's philosophy I will concentrate on three important interrelated problems that any "adequate naturalism" will have to solve and for whose solution he has some very useful suggestions. They are, first, the problem of realism in epistemology (sections 2 and 3); second, the problem of "levels of organization" in ontology, which sometimes turn up in modern debates in the discussion about "natural kinds," "depth realism"~ or about the autonomy of biology (section 4); and, third, the status of subjective experience in the philosophy of mind (section 5). For Roy Wood Sellars the solutions to these problems are closely interrelated. For him naturalism meant an "interpretative synthesis" in which scientific and philosophical insights are integrated into an "organized whole" (EN, i).6 Naturalism was See "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," both in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). See, e.g., "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem" in Philosophical Perspectives, and also his very illuminating article, "The Double-Knowledge Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," New Scholasticism XLV (1971): 269--89...