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.

About the Author
James O'Shea has taught at University College Dublin (UCD) since receiving his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. He has published several books and numerous articles on Hume and Kant, on pragmatism and the history of American philosophy, and in the general areas of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is currently writing on Kant's critical philosophy and on contemporary problems concerning scientific naturalism, pragmatism, and normativity.

Reviews
To acknowledge the deep impact that Sellars has had on their work, a list of prominent, contemporary philosophers honor Sellars's legacy in a volume craftily edited by James R. O'Shea with a superb introduction. Like Sellars's own work, the contributions are distributed across a wide range of topics...Although Sellars's problems have been inherited, it speaks to the quality of this volume that his solutions undergo critical scrutiny at every corner. * Niels Skovgaard-Olsen, Journal of the History of Philosophy *
This collection is a fitting tribute to Sellars by some of his most prominent heirs and should be of interest to Sellarsians of any stripe. * William Rottschaefer, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198766872
Author James R. O'Shea
Format Hardback
Page Count 286
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 558g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 164mm * 20mm