Most of your text (Willem Devries and Timm Triplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given) is about Wilfird Sellars's paper "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." I will be assigning only the text itself, which you will find in an appendix at the end but you may find the body of the book helpful as a commentary.

For the first class you should read all of part I of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." The paper is divided into sections whose numbers run through the whole paper; part I consists of the first 7 sections. Our discussion will focus on two specific passages.

• the dilemma for sense-datum theorists stated in §3

• the "inconsistent triad" presented in §6

There are a number of connections between these passages and things we've read earlier in the course. The closest ties are to Russell's discussion of intuitive judgments of sensation and memory in chs. 11 and 13 of the Problems of Philosophy. It is possible to understand what Sellars says as a direct critique of those ideas. You've encountered the term "given" in connection with such ideas in Blumberg and Feigl's "Logical Positivism" (especially in §II, pp. 285f). And Wittgenstein's discussion of ideas of a private langauge and of a report of private experience are also relevant in a positive way. Although Sellars is less a follower of Wittgenstein than many other philosophers active in the 1950s, he often draws on ideas in Wittgenstein and makes use of them in his own way.