ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, the author returns to Sellars’s scientism and defends a version of the view that Sellars characterizes as philosophia perennis, according to which the manifest image is real and the scientific research only helps to refine what is already manifest. He shows how some of the main strands of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including Sellars’s own view, are led astray by their author’s enthusiasm for the successes of the natural sciences. The author submits that a perennialist position, in line with McDowell’s reform of Sellars’s metaphysical excesses, empowers us to resist the philosophically distorting enthusiasm for the triumphs of scientific inquiry. This lays the ground for his forthcoming perennialist reading of Avicenna.
