دانلود کتاب هگل و مکتب پیتسبورگ

This Element is about the relationship between Hegel and the Pittsburgh School. The Pittsburgh School is comprised of three main members, all of whom taught or currently teach at the University of Pittsburgh: Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom.1 What is it about these philosophers that makes us think they comprise a single philosophical school, and what does Hegel have to do with this designation? There are, as far as I can see, four reasons for thinking that one philosopher belongs to the same school as another: they share a methodology; have significantly overlapping substantive positions; are working out the same basic philosophical insight; or they self-consciously stand in the same tradition of thought. McDowell and Brandom do not share a methodology, nor do they share many substantive philosophical positions.2 But they do share and work out one basic philosophical insight that they self-consciously inherit from a tradition of thought that begins with Kant and comes down to them via Sellars. To put it simply, this insight is the Kantian one that “intuitions without concepts are blind.” This insight has a negative and a positive side. On the negative side, it entails a critique of what Sellars calls the myth of the given, specifically the myth of the sensory given. This is the myth that the mere having of sensible intuitions can itself, prior to deployment of concepts, be thought or knowledge. On the positive side, the insight requires that the theorist develop an account of judgment, which is the act through which intuitions and concepts are unified, and an account of how judgment is related to the world. Simply put, we need an account of thought and knowledge that does not take recourse to the given. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars meant to attack the whole “framework of givenness,” which he argues informs not just “skeptical empiricism” but also “dogmatic rationalism.” It is not only sensible intuitions that can be given, but also universals, categories, and abstract entities. Indeed, for Sellars this framework is so pervasive “that few, if any, philosophers have been altogether free of it; certainty not Kant, and, I would argue, not even Hegel, that great foe of ‘immediacy’” (Sellars 1997, 14). Kant can be read as not free of the framework of givenness because one can read the Critique of Pure Reason as saying that the operations of the faculty of sensibility provide subjects with intentional states or episodes prior to the involvement of the operations of the understanding. While the application of the concepts of the understanding further determines these states and episodes, the mere availability for a subject of an object in space and time does not depend on this application. If it did, then the content of empirical experience would depend upon the conceptual operations of the mind, and this, in turn, would seem to threaten us with a kind of idealism that undermines the independence of the empirical world. On this reading of Kant, givenness is not a mythic vice but a virtue insofar as it allows us to make sense of the objectivity of thought. If one recognizes the need to explain the objectivity of thought, as Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom do, then one is faced with this question: how can one’s account of thought and knowledge avoid the myth of the given while also not falling prey to an idealism that undercuts the independence of the empirical world? It is in attempting to answer this question that Hegel becomes centrally important for McDowell and Brandom, for they both argue that the idealism articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit is unique in being able to meet these two desiderata.3 They both think that the Phenomenology is able to demonstrate how thought, though rationally unbound by anything outside of itself, anything given, is nonetheless answerable to, able to capture in its net, how things are in themselves.