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Brassier - Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism - Sellars's Critical Ontology (Chapter 7 from Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications)
"Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism - Sellars's Critical Ontology (Chapter 7 from Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications)" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
7 Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism Sellars’s Critical Ontology Ray Brassier Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities (universals, forms, species, propositions, etc.). Traditional nominalism proceeded from an em- piricist epistemology that challenges the very possibility of metaphysics, whether idealist or materialist.
Definition · paragraph 1
7 Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism Sellars’s Critical Ontology Ray Brassier Nominalism denies the existence of abstract entities (universals, forms, species, propositions, etc.).
Definition · paragraph 2
102 Ray Brassier goal is primarily expository, I will not address the various objections that might be made against Sellars’s principal claims; others have done so al- ready. 3 I will begin by framing Sellars’s naturalist agenda within the context of what I call the post-Kantian problem of critical ontology. Then I will recapitulate how Sellars’s critique of the given determines his commitment to nominalism.
Definition · paragraph 3
Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism 103 pure concepts of the understanding or Heidegger’s existentials). Sellars’s suggestion is that they are neither. Categories are metalinguistic functions, but their metalinguistic function is nevertheless a mode of representing real- ity.
Definition · paragraph 2
3 I will begin by framing Sellars’s naturalist agenda within the context of what I call the post-Kantian problem of critical ontology. Then I will recapitulate how Sellars’s critique of the given determines his commitment to nominalism.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.