ABSTRACT
One reason for the recent attention to Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy in Buddhist Studies is his attack on what he famously called “The Myth of the Given” in his 1955–1956 lectures “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In that essay, Sellars both articulates that myth in meticulous detail and works to demonstrate that it is a myth. In articulating the myth, he exposes the complexity of the cognitive instincts that drive our naïve understandings of our knowledge of the world and of ourselves. In demonstrating that it is a myth, he shows us just how far these instincts can drive us from self-understanding and demonstrates the pervasiveness of the cognitive illusion of immediate access to our own minds. Buddhist philosophers have long been concerned about exposing the depth of our confusion about ourselves, for it is this confusion that, according to all Buddhist schools, constitutes the foundation of the pervasive suffering of ordinary human life. In exploring the nature of this fundamental and—according to much of the tradition—innate delusion regarding the nature of the self and its relationship to reality, Buddhist philosophers have repeatedly emphasized how much of our experience is mediated by conceptual superimpositions, with the true nature of our minds and experience often opaque to us. Some of these arguments may anticipate the insights of Sellars; some of Sellars’ arguments may enable us to develop better understandings of the corresponding Buddhist ideas.
