Wilfrid Sellars – författare

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.

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was, Richard Rorty writes, "as original a mind as C. S. Peirce, and it has taken almost as long for the importance of his ideas to be appreciated." This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates what Robert Brandom calls the "inferentialist" conception of meaning at the heart of his work. This conception, laid out in the early essays, is deployed in various epistemological contexts throughout the book so that, upon arriving at the concluding papers on Kant, the reader has been given a tour d'horizon not only of the central topics of philosophy of mind and language, but of much of the history of philosophy as well--and, with this, a sense of what a shifting of analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian stage would entail.

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.

"Sellars' s argument in EPM is enormously rich, subtle, and compelling. It is also, for the uninitiated, extraordinarily dense. Willem deVries and Timm Triplett’s comprehensive commentary Knowledge, Mind, and the Given provides a much needed guide. Beginning with a general overview to introduce some main themes and difficulties, deVries and Triplett take the reader step by step through the sixteen parts of the essay, providing at each stage necessary background, illuminating connections, and insightful clarifications of the main lines of argument. . . . deVries and Triplett have written a fine introduction to Sellars’s most important work." --Danielle Macbeth, The Philosophical Review

In pulling these essays together for inclusion in one volume I do not believe that I have done them violence. Since they originally appeared at different times and places they constitute a scattered object. Never­ theless, to the author's eye they have unities of theme and development which, if they fail to give them the true identity of the book, may (to adapt a metaphor from Hume) generate those smooth and easy transi­ tions of the imagination which arouse dispositions appropriate to sur­ veying such identical objects. For the juxtaposition of historical and systematic studies I make no apology. It has been suggested, with a friendly touch of malice, that if Science and Metaphysics consists, as its subtitle proclaims, of Variations on Kantian Themes, it would be no less accurate to sub-title my historical essays 'variations on Sellars ian themes'. But this is as it should be. Phi­ losophy is a continuing dialogue with one's contemporaries, living and dead, and if one fails to see oneself in one's respondent and one's re­ spondent in oneself, there is confrontation but no dialogue. The historian, as Collingwood points out, becomes Caesar's contemporary by learning to think Caesar's thoughts. And it is because Plato thought so many of our thoughts that he is our contemporary and companion.