Reason, Nature, and the Image of Man-in-the-World

Abstract

This thesis examines the philosophical tension between Wilfrid Sellars’s attempt to reconcile the Manifest and Scientific images of man-in-the-world and John McDowell’s critique of that project. Sellars seeks to preserve the normative irreducibility of the Manifest Image while ultimately grounding it in the causal ontology of the Scientific Image. His stereoscopic vision integrates norms with postulational processes, rejecting piecemeal reductionism and the Given in all its forms. The result is a systematic naturalism in which intentionality and normativity are irreducible within the logical space of reasons yet causally reducible within the scientific order of being. McDowell, while sympathetic to Sellars’s critique of the Given, challenges the framework’s guiding assumptions. For McDowell, the tension between the two images is an artifact of a scientism that equates nature with the Scientific Image. By emphasizing second nature and the unboundedness of the conceptual, McDowell argues that human rationality can be understood as a natural phenomenon without requiring a “sideways-on” vindication from a norm-free scientific perspective. He advocates for a relaxed naturalism through a form of quietism that seeks to dissolve, rather than resolve, the perceived conflict. Through a critical reconstruction of both positions, this thesis argues that the debate reveals a deeper meta-philosophical divide: whether philosophy should seek the systematic integration of normativity within a scientific framework, or instead, adopt a stance that resists the compulsion toward explanatory unification. The resulting stalemate encapsulates a fundamental tension in contemporary philosophy concerning the relation between reason, nature, and the scope of philosophical explanation.