Abstract:

1) Wilfrid Sellars once famously remarked, “man couldn’t be man until he encountered himself.” What he had in mind in saying this was the paradox that concerns man’s or person’s status as normative agent. As such, Sellars contends, persons are not like ‘cabbages’ or ‘lions,’ which can be fully captured by descriptive vocabularies and thus are reducible to temporal-spatial-causal explanation in the realm of natural laws.

My first question concerns this characteristically Sellarsian thesis that has had extensive effects on the philosophies of Bob Brandom, John McDowell, and Huw Price: “OK. Persons are ‘sui generis’ (in Sellars’s well-known phrase, they are placed in “the logical space of reasons”) and are irreducible to non-normative explanations. (Sellars’s suggestion is that the irreducibility of person’s normative
character is analogous to that of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’.) But then, what will be the linguistic function (or ‘the depth grammar’) that lies behind the sentences like ‘Jones is a person,’ if these sentences are not to be construed as descriptive?”

2) On the irreducible character of persons, Sellars also says this: “to recognize a featherless biped or dolphin or Martian as a person is to think of oneself and it as belonging to a community.” In my view,
one way to illuminate this thesis--“being a person consists in its being a member of a community”--is to construe it as implying “man was not a man until he found himself in the I-thou (or I-he/she)
relationship with others.” And here’s my second question: “How did it happen that persons came to compose a community, that is, how did it happen that the ‘I-thou’ relationship (the unit that is called ‘we’) came into existence?”

3) In offering the answers to these questions, I will adopt a somewhat unique methodology: my talk will proceed in the style of ‘cross-cultural fusion philosophy’. To be more precise, topics from the tradition of Japanese philosophy will show up in the course of my talk and the vocabularies of Sellars and Brandom are getting mingled up with them. By doing this, I hope to show that the topics from the
Eastern tradition can serve as a rich vein of philosophical ore, i.e., something more than a valuable antique that is of merely historical interest, even for those who are working in the tradition of Western philosophy.