Philosophy ought to be able to give an account of rationality that is not wholly detached from science's account of nature, even if it is not straightforwardly reducible to it.

I think Enlightenment as an epistemic ideal involves rejecting the appeal to a fundamental stratum of non-conceptual self-evidence.

Sellars's "myth of Jones" is deployed against what Sellars calls "the myth of the categorial Given": the idea that to be aware of something is to be aware of it as something. This short circuit between "awareness of" and "awareness as" inhibits the project of self-understanding because it perpetuates the assumption that there is a point where being and knowing coincide.

If nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter whether anything matters or not, then there's no real difference between believing nothing matters and believing something matters.

Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.

Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.