The work of Kripke, Putnam, Kaplan, and others initiated a tradition in philosophy that has come to be known as anti-descriptivism. I argue that when properly interpreted, Wilfrid Sellars is a staunch anti-descriptivist. Not only does he accept most of the conclusions drawn by the more famous anti-descriptivists, he goes beyond their critiques to reject the fundamental tenant of descriptivism—that understanding a linguistic expression consists in mentally grasping its meaning and associating that meaning with the expression. I show that (...) Sellars’ alternative accounts of language and the mind provide novel justifications for the anti-descriptivists’ conclusions. Finally, I present what I take to be a Sellarsian analysis of an important anti-descriptivist issue: the relation between metaphysical modal notions (e.g., possibility) and epistemic modal notions (e.g., conceivability). The account I present involves extension of the strategy he uses to explain both the relation between physical object concepts (e.g., whiteness) and sensation concepts (e.g., the appearance of whiteness), and the relation between concepts that apply to linguistic activity (e.g., sentential meaning) and those that apply to conceptual activity (e.g., thought content). (shrink)

Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On (...) this reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well. (shrink)

Inference and meaning -- Some reflections on language games -- Language as thought and as communication -- Meaning as functional classification : a perspective on the relation of syntax to semantics -- Naming and saying -- Grammar and existence : a preface to ontology -- Abstract entities -- Being and being known -- The lever of Archimedes -- Some reflections on thoughts and things -- Mental events -- Phenomenalism -- The identity approach to the mind-body problem -- Philosophy and the (...) scientific image of man -- "...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks..." -- Some remarks on Kant's theory of experience -- The role of imagination in Kant's theory of experience. (shrink)

I explore conceptual tensions that emerge between Wilfrid Sellars’ and Grace de Laguna’s adoption of behaviorism. Despite agreeing on various points, I argue that Sellars’ and de Laguna’s positions represent a split between normativist and descriptivist approaches to explanation that are generally incompatible, and I explore how both positions claim conceptual priority.

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given (...) in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Practice brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced (...) Sellars's contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture. (shrink)

Sellars's short autobiography. It covers the period of his life up to his first publications, showing the breadth of his background and influences in philosophy.

Sellars argues against Nagelian instrumentalism for his version (not Feyerabend's) of scientific realism.

The tapestry of Wilfrid Sellars’s writings is dauntingly rich in stimulus and suggestion. I shall take up here an intriguing strand of thought that was woven into one of his early papers ‘Language, Rules and Behavior’, and I shall discuss some of the issues to which it gives rise. Sellars was concerned in that paper with the procedures by which people evaluate actions as right or wrong, arguments as valid or invalid, and cognitive claims as well or ill grounded. (...) He sought to map out a true vïa media, in his treatment of such procedures, between rationalistic apriorism and what, for want of a better term then, he called ‘descriptivism’, by which he understood the claim that all meaningful concepts and problems belong to the empirical or descriptive sciences, including the sciences of human behaviour. Sellars was thus led to ask not only ‘What sort of a thing is justification?’ but also ‘How do we come to accept the rules or laws that license justifications?’ And he saw these questions as arising in relation to any dialogue in which one party seeks to justify something to another. With regard to the justification of actions he held that the intuitionism of Ross, Prichard and Ewing was reasonably faithful to the phenomenology of moral thought and experience, though he did not agree with their belief in a nonnatural quality or relation that may belong to actions over and above their empirical characteristics. With regard to the justification of predictions he held that the relevant covering laws are ultimately rendered acceptable by an appeal to instances of their application. But he was reluctant to conceive this kind of appeal as an inductive procedure. Instead he called it an application of Socratic method, since the purpose of this method is to make explicit the rules that we have implicitly adopted for thought and action, and Sellars interpreted our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates B as the expression of a rule governing our use of the terms ‘A’ and ‘B’: science consists in the attempt, by remodeling human language, to develop a system of rule-governed behaviour which will adjust the human organism to the environment. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century". He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". However, while many philosophers have (...) begun to acknowledge Sellars's inspiration in their work, their interpretation of his thought has not always been the most accurate. His writings are difficult. Individually, his essays are complex and sometimes rely on doctrines and arguments he put forward elsewhere. Each of his articles is deepened and strengthened by seeing it in its systematic context, but he never wrote a unified exposition of his system, which therefore has to be pieced together from numerous disparate sources. Willem deVries addresses these difficulties specifically and provides a careful reading and remarkable overview of Sellars's systematic philosophy that will become the standard point of reference for all philosophers seeking to understand Sellars's hugely significant body of work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I examine how Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism in After Finitude, as I understand it, relates firstly to Kant’s transcendental idealist philosophy, and secondly to the analytic Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars. I argue that central to the views of both Kant and Sellars is what might be called, with an ambivalent nod to Meillassoux, an objective correlationism. What emerges in the end as the recommended upshot of these analyses is a naturalistic Kantianism that takes the form of an empirical (...) realism in roughly Kant’s sense, but one that is happily wed with Sellars’ scientific realism, once the latter is disentangled from two implausible commitments that made such a reconciliation seem impossible to Sellars himself. (shrink)

1. My primary aim in this paper is to set the stage for a discussion of some of the central themes in the so-called "identity" approach to the mind-body problem. I have particularly in mind Herbert Feigl's elaborate statement and defense of this approach in Volume II of the Minnesota Studies. A secondary, but more constructive, purpose is to bring out some of the reasons which incline me to think that the theory is either very exciting but false, or true (...) but relatively uninteresting. (shrink)

The essay adopts the Tractarian view that configurations of objects are expressed by configurations of names. Two alternatives are considered: The objects in atomic facts are (1) without exception particulars; (2) one or more particulars plus a universal (Gustav Bergmann). On (1) a mode of configuration is always an empirical relation: on (2) it is the logical nexus of 'exemplification.' It is argued that (1) is both Wittgenstein's view in the Tractatus and correct. It is also argued that exemplification is (...) a 'quasi-semantical' relation, and that it (and universals) are "in the world" only in that broad sense in which the 'world' includes linguistic norms and roles viewed (thus in translating) from the standpoint of a fellow participant. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’s ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars’s view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more— (...) all within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars’s commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly neglected aspect of Sellars’s work and demonstrates that his ethical theory— just like his more widely discussed epistemology— has much to contribute to current debates. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars's iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the given’ taught us that experience must present the world to us as normatively laden, in the sense that the contents of experience must license inferences, rule out and justify various beliefs, and rationalize actions. Somehow our beliefs must be governed by the objects as they present themselves to us. Often this requirement is cashed out using language that attributes agent-like properties to objects: we are described as ‘accountable to’ objects, while (...) objects ‘hold us’ to standards, and so forth. But such language is either deeply anti-naturalistic or trades on a set of metaphors in need of a literal translation. We offer an explanation of how the material features of the world, as received in experience, can rationally constrain our beliefs and practices—one that makes no recourse to this imagery. In particular, we examine the structure of ostensive practices (that is, practices of directing one another's attention to objects and features of the world) and the distinctive role they play in making us jointly beholden to how things actually are. (shrink)

This collection offers the first systematic, comparative analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Pittsburgh school of thought and Husserlian phenomenology. Beginning with an introduction to contemporary philosophical debates about the mind and pragmatism, the essays examine and clarify the discursive divide between analytic and Continental philosophy.

This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars’s thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book’s final section extracts some of the (...) most significant lessons Sellars’s work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience. (shrink)

This is a careful explication of and commentary on Wilfrid Sellars's classic essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" [EPM]. It is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and beyond. The full text of EPM is included in the volume.

3. One of the most striking features of Kant’s epistemology is his insistence on the need for a sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding. “Our knowledge,” he tells us, “springs from two fundamental sources of mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations, the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations. Intuitions and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge….” In spite of this radical difference in role, both sensibility and understanding are construed (...) as, in a broad and ill-defined sense, faculties of representation. It is this, perhaps, which leads him to suggest that they may “spring from a common, but to us unknown, root.”. (shrink)

In response to your kind offer to read through portions of the typescript of my thesis pertaining to your views on intentionality, I am sending you a copy of an introductory section to such a chapter.{1} The enclosed typescript represents a first draft, for which I apologize, but I thought it might be useful to get any comments you might have in at the ground floor, so to speak.

When discussing Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy, very little work has been done to offer a developmental account of his systematic views. More often than not, Sellars’s complex views are presented in a systematic and holistic fashion that ignores any periodization of his work. I argue that there is a metaphilosophical shift in Sellars’s early philosophy that results in substantive changes to his conception of language, linguistic rules, and normativity. Specifically, I claim that Sellars’s shift from a formalist metaphilosophy to one (...) more closely aligned with psychology allows for the construction of a normative conception of language. My central claim is that without his abandonment of earlier metaphilosophical commitments, Sellars could not hold what I call an external conception of normativity. It is this move away from a formalist notion of philosophy that allows Sellars to construct a normative picture of language. I conclude that because this substantive shift in philosophical commitments results from changes in Sellars’s metaphilosophical views, there is insight to be found in a meticulous periodization of his work. (shrink)

This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the practical philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. It features original essays by leading Sellars scholars that examine his ethical theory, his theory of practical reasoning, and his theory of intentional agency. While most scholarship on Sellars's philosophy has focused on his epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of language and mind, Sellars himself regarded his practical philosophy as central to his overall project of situating rational beings within the natural order. The chapters in this (...) volume address this neglected area of Sellars's philosophy. The chapters are divided into thematic sections covering Sellars's theory of we-intentions - influential in contemporary debates on collective intentionality - naturalism and the manifest image, and the moral point of view. Together, they demonstrate how Sellars's practical philosophy contributes to important debates in contemporary philosophy regarding, for example, expressivist approaches to moral thought and group agency in the collective intentionality literature. Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars's Practical Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in Wilfrid Sellars, American philosophy, and ethics. (shrink)

A brief "book note" on James O'Shea's "Wilfrid Sellars".

Scholars of Wilfrid Sellars’s thought split into Right- and Left-wing Sellarsians. Right-wing Sellarsians urge Sellars’s scientific realism and the prominence of the scientific image of man in the synoptic vision. Left-wing Sellarsians emphasize the prominence of the logical space of reasons over that of causes, rejecting Sellars’s scientism. In his recent book James O’Shea attempts to reconcile these Sellarsian images, arguing that one best understands the Sellarsian synoptic image in terms of a norm/nature meta-principle that endorses the conceptual irreducibility (...) and causal reducibility of norms. In this paper, I argue that O’Shea’s norm/nature meta-principle renders Sellars’s synoptic vision a Left-wing one. In its stead, I present a Sellarsian ideal: the view that Sellars ought to have held, whether he did so or not. My synoptic Sellarsian vision is based in part on the claim that Sellars found norms in nature and on a scientifically based philosophical account of norms in nature, whether these norms be biological, psychological, social, cultural or personal. I maintain then that Sellars was a Right-wing Sellarsian and that, if he wasn’t, he should have been. Indeed, a Sellars redivivus would be the leader of his party! (shrink)

This paper explores some ideas of Wilfrid Sellars to raise two difficulties for a naturalistic approach to the mind. The first difficulty, which is methodological, is a corollary of Sellars’s distinction between two images of man-in-the-world, the manifest and the scientific image. For Sellars, taking science seriously requires that we think of it as constructing a unified image of man-in-the-world of its own. I argue that it is the rivalry between the manifest and the scientific image which gives rise (...) to the mind-body-problem. The challenge for a naturalistic solution to the mind-body-problem is that it is not legitimate to isolate single scientific results from their theoretical context in order to integrate them piecemeal into the manifest image. According to Sellars, a satisfactory solution to the mind-body-problem must attempt nothing less than a fusion of both images which somehow respects and preserves the unity of each. The second, substantial difficulty for a naturalistic approach to the mind is that of coming to terms with the normativity of the mental. Many interpreters take Sellars to hold that normativity sets the mental apart from the rest of nature. Against this I argue that according to Sellars the living is governed by norms of its own. It follows that normativity cannot serve as the mark of the mental. I argue that according to Sellars the distinguishing feature of the mental lies elsewhere, namely in the way in which normative force comes about. Unlike biological norms, the norms of thought owe their force to a common practice of mutual evaluation. However, the assumption that there are norms in animate nature should make it easier for naturalists to accept that the mental is characterized by norms of its own. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism is the first study of its kind to address a range of realist and idealist views inspired by psychological nominalism. Bringing together premier analytic realists and distinguished defenders of German idealism, it reveals why psychological nominalism is one of the most important theories of the mind to come out the 20th century. The theory, first put forward by Wilfrid Sellars, argues that language is the only means by which humans can learn the types (...) of socially shared practices that permit rationality. Although wedded to important aspects of German idealism, Sellars' theory is couched in bold realist terms of the analytic tradition. Those who are sympathetic to German idealism find this realist's appropriation of German idealism problematic. Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism thus creates a rare venue for realists and idealists to debate the epistemic outcome of the mental processes they both claim are essential to experience. Their resulting discussion bridges the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. In providing original and accessible chapters on psychological nominalism, this volume raises themes that intersect with numerous disciplines: the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also provides clarity on arguably the best available account of why humans can reason, be self-aware, know, and act as agents. (shrink)

2. Because of the possibility of lies, or the misuse of language, I believe that Professor Hempel's formulation of the problem of empirical certainty must be interpreted as a convenient abbreviation, in linguistic terms, of a question about beliefs. A complete formulation of the question would have to make some reference to the speaker's beliefs as he utters an "experiential statement.".

Wilfred Sellars appears in Bas C. van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image as one of van Fraassen’s primary realist opponents. However, little attention has been paid to Sellars’s influence on van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism, despite the significant impact of The Scientific Image on the realism debate and recent renewed interest in Sellars’s scientific realism. In the first half of this article, I argue that reading The Scientific Image against a Sellarsian background helps clarify and (...) justify van Fraassen’s controversial characterization of scientific realism. Sellars and van Fraassen each inhabit a recognizable position in the other’s description of the realism debate and can reciprocally recognize the other as inhabiting the opposing position. The second half of this article reconstructs van Fraassen’s objections to Sellarsian realism in The Scientific Image and its precursors. I argue that van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism significantly developed between his 1975 paper, “Wilfrid Sellars on Scientific Realism” and his 1980 book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions ed. by Daniele De Santis and Danilo MancaHeath WilliamsDE SANTIS, Daniele and Danilo Manca, editors. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023. xiv + 272 pp. Cloth, $95.00This is an eminently readable and engaging collection of essays. There is much more here than merely comparing and contrasting two disparate thinkers. There are important contributions (...) to metaphysics, epistemology, thought about the relation between science and culture, and the future of phenomenology and pragmatism. It has what one wants from a collection of edited papers: very few contributions that are obscure or tangential, with nearly every one addressing a broadly relevant philosophical topic.The two major motifs running through the various works in this edited book are epistemologically orientated questions on the myth of the given, and metaphysically orientated questions arising from the contrasting scientific and manifest images. As Landfredi states, these "are two main theoretical dimensions in which phenomenology and Sellars's approach critically confront each other."To the metaphysical motifs firstly. Husserl's thoughts on the relation between the scientific and manifest image is outlined in his Crisis of the European Sciences and Sellars's in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In contemporary metaphysics, the competition between the manifest and scientific image has been heightened thanks to the aggressive scientific realism of works like Ladyman and Ross's Everything Must Go, coupled as it is with a dismissal of our commonsense perceptual and cognitive capacities.Both Lanfredi and Manca take a conciliatory approach, aiming to minimize incompatibility between Husserl's manifest and Sellars's scientific images. Manca's attentive and judicious reading makes apparent the origins of the metaphysical commitments of both thinkers. The former accepts the power of the scientific method of mathematization but warns that its ontology remains forever incomplete until the lifeworld is considered. The latter's scientific realism ultimately affords science the final say on what exists. The difference between them comes down to whether the emergent properties of a system are ultimately reducible to parts and the arrangement between them. Sellars thinks they are, while for Husserl "the parts are not juxtaposed from without but integrated with each other in such a way that they become able to generate new [End Page 546] properties." A thematically related analysis is found in the contribution of De Santis, who argues that Simons's adaptation of Husserlian mereology fails to provide a solution on how to build complex particulars out of basic ones.Hopp's article connects our two domains of critical encounter as he suggests that you can get from a phenomenological epistemology to a metaphysical reification of items in manifest image, because fulfilled perceptual knowledge claims presuppose the existence of that which is perceived. He thinks there are resources within Husserl not only to defend this position but to use it to critique many of the claims that undergird Sellars's prosecution of the myth. Hopp ends by asking what current experimental evidence the scientific realist has to rule out the existence of macrosized phenomenologically given objects. One might refer to the above-mentioned work by Ladyman and Ross by way of reply.Epistemological themes include the claim that aspects of phenomenology can be imported or modified to forge a coherent account of perceptual knowledge that (a) affords perception a role in epistemology and (b) explains the concomitant, vexing relation between the space of reasons of causes while (c) avoiding the myth of the given.Two authors who demonstrate close parallel between Husserl and Sellars are Nunziante and Rump. Nunziante shows that one of Sellars's attempts at (a) comes via his account of "perceptual takings," which is influenced by, and homologous to, Husserl's account of the passive synthesis of prepredicative perception in Experience and Judgement, as handed to Sellars by Farber. These prove to be essential stepping stones in Sellars's thinking about how the perceptual realm marries to the intellectual one.Rump shows that Sellars's attempt to solve the regress problem for coherentism in order to solve (a) stumbles on the problem of how causal, nonconceptual, noncategorial, and nonpropositionally structured protoperceptual experiences furnish... (shrink)

This volume presents Rosenberg's previously published studies of the central elements and implications of Sellars' philosophy, along with three new essays that ...

This book offers an innovative defense of Wilfrid Sellar's notion of ideal truth. Sellars adopts two attractive ideas about truth: the pragmatist idea that the concept of truth cannot be understood independently from the norms and practices we find ourselves with and the realist idea that there is one ultimate truth about how the world is. Sellars is thus committed both to an immanent notion of truth and an ideal notion of truth. This book discusses these countervailing tendencies and (...) tries to reconcile them. The author's defense of Sellars's notion of truth minimizes problematic commitments while still being recognizably rooted in Sellars's texts. Additionally, the author defends several innovative claims with respect to Sellars's thinking, for example, about the relative unimportance of his controversial concept of pictorial adequacy and about the neglected significance of considerations concerning context-sensitive expressions in his thought. Wilfrid Sellars on Truth will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wilfrid Sellars, pragmatism, and questions about truth, naturalism, and scientific realism. (shrink)

A review of deVries' and O'Shea's books, both titled "Wilfrid Sellars". By Jaroslav Peregrin.

In his philosophical works Wilfrid Sellars - like Ludwig Wittgenstein - clearly distinguishes the domain of philosophy from that of empirical sciences. Within the framework of this differentiation he insists on a further sharp distinction between the concepts of empirical or factual linguistics and those of pure semiotic. It is quite clear - thus Sellars's example - that formal logic and pure mathematics are not empirical sciences nor do they constitute branches of any such science. This distinction was historically (...) gained from the development of pure syntax. According to Sellars, pure syntaxis concerned with „rules defining the formal structure of calculi rather than languages''. In a syntactic system understood in this sense we use neither the concepts of designation or truth, nor of verifiability or meaningfulness. The concepts used in logic and mathematics - taken as examples of such systems - are clarified through identification with concepts which occur in the formation and transformation of definitive rules of calculi. In this context, logic and mathematics are normative rather than factual sciences. The basis of their norms is grounded in humanly conceived rules. (shrink)

Sellars was an inferentialist about meaning. He thus effectively accorded modality a categorial function, maintaining that any meaningful assertion involves implicit commitment to rules of material inference, which modal propositions explicitly endorse. But Sellars was also a modal anti-realist, construing modality as “entirely immanent to thought” (LRB §40), not present in the world an sich. These two commitments, Klemick argues, render it impossible in principle for us to describe the world an sich adequately, undermining Sellars’ scientific realism, on which, at (...) the “ideal outcome of scientific inquiry,” “the gulf between appearances and things-in-themselves [... can] be bridged” (SM II §51). Sellars’ attempt to ground his modal anti-realism in an ideal “pure description of the world” (CDCM §79) cannot succeed, given modality’s categorial function. Further, his subsequent deployment of picturing as a naturalistic criterion of ontological commitment founders on an analogue of the Kantian problem of noumenal affection: the descriptions of picturing relations that render this proposal intelligible are emptied of content by the denial that the in-itself is modally characterized. Sellars’ worthy aim of preserving the world’s independence of our conceptual activity, Klemick concludes, doesn’t require denying that it exhibits modal relations isomorphic to the semantic relations within our conceptual scheme. (shrink)

This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between the (...) ‘manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism. (shrink)

Leading philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic present essays on Wilfrid Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy. They discuss empiricism, perception, epistemology, realism, and normativity, showing how vibrant Sellarsian philosophy remains in the 21st century.