Myths and Images in Sellars’s Philosophy

Abstract

Sellars introduced his distinction between the manifest and scientific images of man in the world. Though at first sight they seem incompatible, both of them are inescapable, so the philosopher’s task must be to try to fuse them together. At the same time, he considers the «myth of the given» to be one of the main errors commonly accepted in modern philosophy. Paradoxically, he uses a myth of his own, the so called «myth of Jones», to kill the «myth of the given». These two sellarsian subjects have been very influential and widely discussed, but the question of their mutual relationship has gone largely unnoticed. In this paper I try to elaborate a sort of meta-myth incorporating the insights we find in both of them.

Keywords: myth, manifest image, scientific image, given.