- Lived:
- Born 1942, Boksburg, South Africa · Oxford, then Pittsburgh
- Tradition:
- Analytic philosophy of mind and ethics; the "Pittsburgh School"; heir of Sellars, Kant, Aristotle, and — surprisingly — Hegel
- The Big Idea:
- Experience is not a screen between you and the world; it is an openness to the world, because the capacities you use in thinking are already at work in seeing.
- In their words:
- "the unboundedness of the conceptual" — his phrase for the claim that there is no outside edge where thought stops and raw reality begins.
- If you remember one thing:
- He set out to cure philosophy of a seesaw it had been riding for centuries — between a world that stamps itself on a passive mind and a mind that spins free of the world — and his cure was to say that when you open your eyes, the world itself comes into view.