45 lines
2.6 KiB
Python
45 lines
2.6 KiB
Python
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stringo = """
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Accordingly, for Sellars, the fundamental import of the manifest
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image is not so much ontological as normative, in the sense that it
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provides the framework ‘in which we think of one another as sharing
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the community intentions which provides the ambience of principles
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and standards (above all those which make meaningful discourse and
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rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual
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lives’(Sellars 1963a: 40). Thus, the manifest image does not so much
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catalogue a set of indispensable ontological items which we should
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strive to preserve from scientific reduction; rather, it indexes the com-
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munity of rational agents. In this regard, the primary component of the
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manifest image, Sellars suggests, is the notion of persons as loci of
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intentional agency. Consequently, although the manifest image is a
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‘disciplined and critical’ theoretical framework, one which could also be
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said to constitute a certain kind of ‘scientific image’ – albeit one that is
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‘correlational’ as opposed to ‘postulational’ (Sellars 1963a: 7) – it is not
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one which we are in a position simply to take or leave. For unlike
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other theoretical frameworks, Sellars maintains, the manifest image
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provides the ineluctable prerequisite for our capacity to identify our-
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selves as human, which is to say, as persons: ‘[M]an is that being which
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conceives of itself in terms of the manifest image. To the extent that
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the manifest image does not survive […] to that extent man himself
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would not survive’ (Sellars 1963a: 18). What is indispensable about our
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manifest self-image, Sellars concludes, is not its ontological commit-
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ments, in the sense of what it says exists in the world, but rather its
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normative valence as the framework which allows us to make sense of
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ourselves as rational agents engaged in pursuing various purposes in
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the world. Without it, we would simply not know what to do or how to
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make sense of ourselves – indeed, we would no longer be able to recog-
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nize ourselves as human. Accordingly, Sellars, echoing Kant, concludes
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that we have no option but to insist that the manifest image enjoys a
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practical, if not theoretical, priority over the scientific image, since it
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provides the source for the norm of rational purposiveness, which we
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cannot do without. In this regard, the genuine philosophical task,
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according to Sellars, would consist in achieving a properly stereoscopic
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integration of the manifest and scientific images, such that the language
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of rational intention would come to enrich scientific theory so as to
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allow the latter to be directly wedded to human purposes.
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"""
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print(
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stringo.replace('\n', ' ')
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)
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