Stereoscopic vision in Wilfrid Sellars’ thought: ontological approaches through post-contemporary art

Abstract

By analyzing Wilfrid Sellars’s contributions to dealing with the complexity of what knowledge is and how it is formed – epistemology and ontology – and Thomas Metzinger’s theoretical complement to Sellars’ ontology, I explore how the impasse in contemporary art caused by the aesthetic correlation of subject and object can be overcome by a new paradigm in post-contemporary art. Firstly, I use Sellars’ account of stereoscopic vision and his critique to foundationalist ideas and classic empiricist theories to describe how 20th-century modern and post-modern art practices can be transcended through rejection of the given contemporary realism and naturalist-materialism. This notion has gained particular relevance due to breakthroughs within the fields of neurosciences and computer sciences, as demonstrated in such examples of post-contemporary art as Emanuel Gollob’s Doing Nothing with AI 1.0 (2019). I then expand on the Sellarsian scientific ontological perspective through Thomas Metzinger’s notion of the Phenomenal Self Model (PSM), which provides an approach not found in Sellars’ thought. A return to Sellars is necessary, however, to attend to other forms of post-contemporary art, including Serious Games III: Immersion (2009) by Harun Farocki, which focuses on the formation of human experience through a scientific ontological understanding of the mental as part of nature. The theories of Wilfrid Sellars and Thomas Metzinger enable us to go beyond the drift initiated by Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the 20th century, by configuring a paradigm for post-contemporary aesthetics that clarifies the current state of the arts and non-correlationist thought.

Keywords

• Wilfrid Sellars
• Thomas Metzinger
• post-contemporary art
• stereoscopic vision
• cognitive sciences
• neurosciences