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The Metaphysics of Sensation; Psychological Nominalism and the Reality of Consciousness
"The Metaphysics of Sensation; Psychological Nominalism and the Reality of Consciousness" 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
Sellars’ Rortyan heirs have made much of his psychological nominalism, but tend to dismiss his suggestion that sensation has a metaphysical purchase as an 3 Th e Metaphysics of Sensation: Psychological Nominalism and the Reality of Consciousness Ray Brassier, American University of Beirut ( LE ) 59
Definition · paragraph 2
Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism 60 aberrant relapse into dogmatic rationalism. I want to argue that Sellars’ account of the metaphysics of sensation should not be dismissed as a dogmatic regression; rather, it off ers a way of resolving the deadlock between realists whose equation of consciousness with knowledge leads them to embrace dualism and anti- realists whose reduction of consciousness to conceptual awareness threatens to sever the causal link between mind and nature.
Definition · paragraph 1
Wilfrid Sellars fi rst coined the expression “psychological nominalism” and defended the doctrine throughout his long philosophical career. But he also distinguished between two aspects of the mind, thinking and sensing, and laid claim to realism about both.
Definition · paragraph 1
If psychological nominalism is complicit with this denial—which strikes many philosophers as absurd—some would say it deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of philosophical history along with its behaviorist sibling. Wilfrid Sellars fi rst coined the expression “psychological nominalism” and defended the doctrine throughout his long philosophical career. But he also distinguished between two aspects of the mind, thinking and sensing, and laid claim to realism about both.
Definition · paragraph 1
For philosophers of a realist stamp, psychological nominalism, understood as the claim that all awareness is a linguistic aff air ( EPM 160), is of a piece with philosophical behaviorism, which allegedly denies the reality of consciousness.
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.