Daniel Sacilotto is a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on the fields of contemporary philosophy and Latin American literature. In particular, his research focuses on the reconciliation of rationalism and materialism, and the methodological relation between epistemology and ontology in contemporary philosophy. He is currently finishing a full-length monograph tentatively titled Saving the Noumenon: An Essay on the Foundations of Ontology, in which he proposes a critical reading of the “ontological turn” in contemporary philosophy, and lays the foundations for a new transcendental epistemology, chiefly inspired in the works of Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Alain Badiou, Lorenz Puntel, Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and Jay Rosenberg.
Articles
On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at the Analytic / Continental Divide
In this essay, I will situate some of Wilfrid Sellars’ epistemology and metaphysics in the context of broad methodological concerns that have brought about a fundamental divergence in mainstream approaches of the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions in 20th Century philosophy. In particular, I trace how Sellars’ appropriation of Kant – his ‘naturalism with a normative turn’, as James O’Shea calls it – can be helpfully understood as a possible resolution of the disjunction between the wholesale depreciation of epistemology conceived by some strands within the Continental post-Heideggerian tradition, and the continuation of epistemology and of the scientific aspirations of philosophy within the context of the analytic ‘linguistic turn’.