standalone · session

Object Naturalism, Subject Naturalism, Process Naturalism and Beyond Ray Brassier

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT · SELF-TRANSCRIBED (WHISPER ASR) · NOT AN AUTHORISED TRANSCRIPT

Ray Brassier lecture on Sellars's transcendental naturalism versus Brandom's critique.

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Series
standalone
Duration
00:41:51 (~42 min)
Words
5,629
Corpus cluster
audio-land
Source/billing metadata (unverified)
Ray Brassier
Topics
Ray Brassier · Wilfrid Sellars · naturalism · Robert Brandom
Source SHA-256 (txt)
90dfbdcc84da4b28ff9007879423b15dc244c45e357ebca07f10282bf9bfd3c5
Source SHA-256 (json)
5c0b1c59349b81822fc7e5bccc445382dd1b5721fcdb53f71f79e5a9e2b32977

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

  • 00:00:00

    I'm going to talk about Wilfred Sellers and I'm going to try to explain, well, there's a, in a way, there is a continuity between this, my current work on Sellers, which I hope will result in a book in about a year or so, and the work, the book I published a decade ago. My book opens with an account of Sellers…

  • 00:09:46

    Transcendental logic then aims to uncover both what it is for something to be an empirical representable and what it is for something to be a true representing. Understanding the former involves grasping the way in which thinking interacts with sensing, while understanding the latter requires grasping the nature…

  • 00:15:25

    God would have a non-analogical grasp of things in themselves by virtue of the fact that his intuitive representations are not passive, but are the very volitions by which they are created. It's precisely God's intellect, which is the most important thing in the world, which is the most important thing in the world…

  • 00:20:29

    So, Sellers is going to say that Sellers wants to distinguish between intuition, and sensation. And he wants to say that there is that space and time are conceptually intuited, okay, but, so that the understanding, the synthesis of apprehension is already at work in sensibility, and it forms the kind of the, you know…

  • 00:25:28

    Just as the characteristics of non-conceptual representings cannot be construed as resembling what is conceptually represented through them, so the characteristics of sense impressions cannot be identified with those of their typical causes. These characteristics must be understood as new theoretical predicates…

  • 00:31:16

    Describing and explaining are distinguishable but inseparable, says Sellers. So that describing and explaining things always goes hand in hand. To explain means to understand the modal properties or the modal characteristics of any empirical entity. It's part of the condition of being able to properly classify…

  • 00:35:28

    Now, according to Brandom, Sellers' claim is that our everyday descriptions of things cats, persons, passengers, is explained by postulating non-conceptual complexes of representations. According to Brandom, this explanation requires identifying the properties of conceptually represented contents with those…

  • 00:41:41

    So, it's a very, very very much constraint. Okay, that's it. I'll just stop. Thanks.