In this interview, Willem A. deVries, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and co-editor of the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy book series, and Marc A. Joseph, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Missouri and Professor Emeritus at Mills College, discuss their respective work on Wilfrid Sellars and Donald Davidson. The two are currently accepting paper proposals focused on the relationship between these two thinkers in preparation for a new edition of the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy.
What inspired this call for papers?
deVries: Besides Quine and (maybe) Putnam, Davidson and Sellars are probably the two most influential American analytic philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. There are some obvious, historical points of contact between them—they both studied at Harvard, both were centrally concerned with issues in the philosophy of language and meaning and the philosophy of mind, both were influenced by the psychological research of the ‘50s, for instance. Yet they rarely mention each other—which is often true of their followers as well. Their philosophies seem to have developed in isolation from each other. But I have suspected for some time that the story is more complex and more interesting than that. Superficially, note that in several cases, they share titles: “Mental Events,” “Actions and Events.” Their theories of mental state attributions seem similar; the ideal of rationality figures large for each; each espouses a naturalism that leaves room for an autonomous language of the mental; each recognizes and provides for the importance of sociality in the constitution of meaning. I’ve worked a lot on Sellars, trying to help others understand his philosophy, and it long seemed to me that, with a few exceptions (Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Bob Brandom among them), those influenced by Davidson were very resistant to Sellars—not so much by simply disagreeing with Sellars, but rather in more basic assumptions about what philosophy is up to and how to prosecute it. And, since turn-about is indeed often fair play, I had to acknowledge that there is much in and about Davidson that I “don’t get.” So getting the Davidsonians and the Sellarsians talking to each other has seemed a challenge worth pursuing. Since I helped start the book series on American Philosophy a decade ago, I have tried to recruit several people to write a book for the series comparing and contrasting the philosophical theories of Sellars and Davidson. But I haven’t had any takers, because everyone acknowledges that it would be a difficult, perhaps monumental task. So plan B developed: let’s chip away at the task by asking people to write smaller pieces, essays that deal just with one or two aspects of this complex relation. Asking Marc to help then became an obvious move: He wrote the book on Davidson in the same series for which I wrote the book on Sellars, and we’d worked well together during the “Kant, Hegel, and Sellars” NEH Seminar.
Tell us more about the work of Donald Davidson and Wilfrid Sellars. Why is it important to study these two philosophers in relation to one another?
Joseph: Although Sellars (1912-1989) and Davidson (1917-2003) were near contemporaries, neither philosopher devotes any substantial attention to the other in his published works. In his correspondence with Gilbert Harman, Sellars engages with what he calls “Carnap-Tarski semantics” more seriously than he does in his published writings, and he mentions Davidson a couple of times, and there are a few scattered references to Sellars in Davidson’s writings, but most of these don’t go very deep. (The exception is Davidson’s posthumous book on predication, where Sellars does get more of a hearing.)
Nevertheless, there are important points of contact between the two philosophers, as well as instructive differences. Both Sellars and Davidson are working through the mid-to-late 20th century re-evaluation of the empiricist inheritance that shaped what became analytic philosophy, and both are critical of key elements of that picture. In its broadest terms, both philosophers challenge the solipsistic, mentalistic conception of knowledge and meaning that informs the tradition from Descartes’ Meditations through Carnap’s Aufbau and set in its place systems of interrelated views that prioritize a holistic and social conception of mind, action, and language. Rorty describes both philosophers as pragmatists, though Sellars rejects that term early (because he is thinking of James’ pragmatist theory of truth) and Davidson embraces it only in a late reflection. But both philosophers figure prominently in the pragmatist revival that is ascendent in important quarters of analytic philosophy, especially in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell.
At the same time, differences divide the two philosophers. Partly these are a matter of method. Sellars comes to his views from a deep reading of the history of philosophy, while Davidson’s primary historical reference points are his early reading of Quine’s Word and Object and what he eventually comes to see (under the influence of my teacher, Sue Larson) as his affinity with the later Wittgenstein. This asymmetry in their engagement with the history of philosophy leaves a lot of spadework to be done in sorting out their relation to the options offered by the philosophical tradition.
More fundamentally, they differ in their philosophical semantics, and given the centrality of language in their respective writings, this difference ramifies through their work. Sellars defines his approach to language in opposition to the familiar truth-conditional semantics that we identify with Tarski, but which Sellars connects primarily with Carnap; for Davidson, Tarski is a North Star, though he turns Tarski on his head by taking truth as an evidential starting point and pursuing meaning. This leads Sellars to investigate language as a rule-governed activity grounded in an account of human beings as rational agents and Davidson to approach language empirically as a system of observed behaviors understood through strong assumptions about the rationality of speakers. In the end, coming from different assumptions and methodologies, they converge on a view that essentially erases the philosophy of language as a separate discipline and embeds it in the philosophy of action.
What sort of research already exists on their relation to one another?
deVries: A search in the Philosophers Index turns up just 10 articles and a few books that mention both. Not all are in English. John McDowell has a couple of items on the list, as do Jaroslav Peregrin and Bruce Aune. Richard Manning has a piece on their treatments of first-person authority. On the whole, given their importance, there is surprisingly little. It is a fallow field ripe for plowing.
When did you begin your research on these thinkers? What led you to them?
deVries: I first read Sellars back in undergraduate school. First in a Kant course, then, since he was so puzzling, in a senior reading course with Dick Bernstein. I wrote my senior thesis on Sellars and Merleau-Ponty on Perception. I went to Pitt for grad school, because I was so intrigued (and enthused) about Sellars. I then went off into German Idealism, only to return to Sellars when I came to UNH, where my colleagues wanted Sellars decoded for them. Any Davidson I know, I have to admit, I picked up on the fly as I worked on the relevant topics in philosophy of mind or language.
Joseph: I came to Davidson earlier and Sellars later. I began reading Davidson in graduate seminars with Sue Larson, and I had the opportunity to write a book on Davidson. I don’t remember exactly when I started reading Sellars; around 2005, I began teaching Kant every year in my modern philosophy seminar, and at some point I had the crazy idea that studying Sellars would help me better understand Kant. I don’t know that that was the case, but reading Sellars led me back to Davidson on questions of semantics, action theory, philosophical methodology, and ontology, and back to Wittgenstein (on whom I wrote my dissertation) on rule-following.
What sort of papers are you hoping will be submitted?
Joseph: We’re hoping for papers from both sides of the aisle, as well as from people who work primarily in the fields covered by Sellars and Davidson and can situate their work in relation to the two philosophers. Since there has been so little cross-talk, there is work to be done in seeing where Sellars and Davidson stand in relation to one another and to other figures in the history of philosophy, but part of the interest in their work is that it remains current and marks out some of the open options on widely discussed questions. We expect, then, that papers will engage not only with the writings of Sellars and Davidson, but also with issues that have strong current interest.
deVries: Some of the topics we would like to receive proposal for include:
⦁ The role of semantic theory in philosophical thought
⦁ The status and analysis of mentalistic language
⦁ Knowledge of mental states (one’s own and that of others)
⦁ Reasons and causes; the realm of law and the space of reasons
⦁ The idea of a conceptual scheme
⦁ Coherence in truth and knowledge
⦁ Actions and events
⦁ Predication
⦁ First-person authority
⦁ The mental life of animals
⦁ Ontology in Davidson and Sellars
⦁ Philosophical methodology
What sort of reception are you hoping this collection of papers will have?
deVries: I’m hoping that the collection will greatly encourage further dialogue between Davidsonians and Sellarsians, and that the result of such dialogue will mean some real progress in the fields of joint concern. Particularly where their approaches seem so different, in semantics and philosophy of action, understanding where and why Davidson and Sellars differ and where they agree should help us all think more clearly and more deeply.
How can people interested in this call for papers contact you to learn more or to submit a piece for consideration?
Please send abstracts (250-500 words) along with a CV to Willem A. deVries (willem.devries@unh.edu) or Marc Joseph (mjoseph@ucmo.edu). The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 1, 2022, and we will take one month for reviewing and accepting proposals. We plan to notify those who propose to write an essay by the beginning of November, 2022, and drafts of the essays would then be due one year later, November 2023.
Willem A. deVries
Willem A. deVries is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, retiring in 2021 after 33 years there. He has also taught at Amherst College, Harvard University, Tufts University, University College Dublin, and the University of Vienna. Along with Henry Jackman, he co-edits the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy book series. His undergraduate degree is from Haverford College, his graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. His publications have focused on G.W.F. Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars, with forays into other topics as well.
Marc A. Joseph
Marc A. Joseph is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Missouri and Professor Emeritus at Mills College. He is the author of Donald Davidson (McGill-Queen's University Press) and the editor of a revised translation and critical edition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Broadview Press). He has a BA in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also studied mathematics and classics, and a PhD from Columbia University. Professor Joseph’s current research focuses on problems in post-Kantian metaphysics about the nature and structure of objectivity, especially as these matters arise in connection with the works of Kant, Sellars, and Davidson.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
