Wilfrid Sellars

James O'Shea, Lecturer in Philosophy, University College, Dublin

"Besides providing an introduction to Sellars' philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars also provides a succinct and illuminating biographical sketch of a man raised in an intensely intellectual environment."Philosophy Now "I know that a review without any critical comments looks like an apology rather than a real review ... and to my embarrassment, there is little I can say by way of criticism about James O'Shea's book. The depth and colorfulness of the depiction of Sellars' philosophy as presented by O'Shea [is] remarkable."Erkenntnis"Not only does this book present a comprehensive picture of Sellars?s philosophical system in its breadth, its depth and subtlety, it does so with a freshness and lucidity that I have not seen before in commentaries on Sellars, including my own."Tom Vinci, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"A pellucid introduction to the systematic thought of one of the deepest, most important, and least understood of twentieth-century philosophers."Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburgh"Jim O'Shea's compact book is an extremely valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, presenting the essential elements of his dialectically intricate work in a relatively brief and eminently readable form. The book offers clear and accessible accounts of many of Sellars' most challenging ideas, embedded in a lucid expository structure that captures and effectively conveys the deeply systematic character of his philosophical vision. O'Shea insightfully traces the implications of Sellars' "naturalism with a normative turn" for the innovative conceptions of meaning, knowledge, representation, and truth in terms of which he undertook to reconcile our "manifest image" of ourselves as unitary subjects of sensation, thought, and action with the continually-developing "scientific image" of a world composed only of imperceptible impersonal entities and forces."Jay F. Rosenberg, University of North Carolina

• Preface ixAcknowledgements xiiIntroduction 11 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientific images 10The clash of the images and the status of the sensible qualities 14Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical systems? 172 Scientific Realism and the Scientific Image 23Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientific theories 24Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientific realism 32The ontological primacy of the scientific image 413 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48Approaching thought through language: is meaning a relation? 49Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’ nominalism 63Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the metalinguistic account 694 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the space of meanings 83Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner thoughts 86Privileged access and other issues in Sellers’ account of thinking 975 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the Given 106The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107Toward Sellers’ account of perception and appearance 118Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our knowledge 125Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our sensory experiences 1366 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientific image 158The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute processes 1637 A Synoptic Vision: Sellers’ Naturalism with a Normative Turn 176The structure of Sellers’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178Persons in the synoptic vision 185Notes 191Bibliography 228Index 243