engleski

Sellars Contra Deleuze on Sensation, Knowledge and Aesthetics

With regards to Kant's path-breaking conception of knowledge as a necessary synthesis of sensible intuitions and concepts of the understanding, Gilles Deleuze's and Wilfrid Sellars' respective philosophical projects can be interpreted as two opposite ways of pursuing this basic Kantian idea. On the one hand, for Deleuze, the adventure of thinking always begins with an encounter with the sentiendum, or that which can only be sensed, and the task before us is to create the concept appropriate to the singularity of that encounter. Of course, the concept in question cannot be the Kantian concept of the understanding, which is by definition too general for the job. Therefore, the main task for philosophy is to formulate an account of this other kind of concept formation, or of this other kind of knowledge, "a knowledge that science hides from us" (Deleuze). Contrasting the arts to the sciences, Deleuze claims that philosophy should turn to artistic practice and aesthetic experience as its main models of attaining this other knowledge. On the other hand, Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given consists in denying to non-propositional items (such as sense data) any kind of foundational role in the constitution of knowledge. According to Sellars, to know something is to place it in "the logical space of reasons, " i.e., to "be able to justify what one says." Therefore, it is imperative not to confuse the space of causes (the natural domain) with the logical space of reasons (the normative domain). The main task for philosophy today consists in an attempt to integrate the two seemingly opposed images of "man-in-the-world": the scientific image, which deals with the natural order, and the manifest image, which deals with the normative order. The aim of this talk is threefold. First, to confront Deleuze’s and Sellars’ respective accounts of sensation and its function in the formation of knowledge. Second, to determine the precise role that art in general, and aesthetic experience in particular play in Deleuze’s philosophical system as elaborated in Difference and Repetition. Third and final, to contrapose to this Deleuzian aesthetics an exploration of the possibility of a post-Sellarsian theory of art and aesthetic experience.

Kant; Sellars; Deleuze; sensation; knowledge; aesthetics

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