Abstract

The paper spells out an argument to the effect that rejecting what Sellars denounces as the “myth of the given” has a bearing not only on epistemology, but also on ontology: we get to recognizing persons as ontologically primitive. We spell that argument out by drawing on what is known as left-wing Sellarsianism, although our aim is not the exegesis of Sellars’s texts. Our aim is to show how one can get from this argument to a social ontology in the guise of a synoptic view that recognizes both persons and matter in motion as ontologically primitive and that employs the conceptual tools of ontic structural realism.