Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, by Willem A. deVries (ed).

Abstract

This is a good time to study Sellars. Among the great systematic thinkers of twentieth century analytic philosophy — Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine — Sellars stands out in speaking to our present concerns. A sort of ‘psychological turn’ has succeeded the famous linguistic turn of the twentieth century, and this makes Sellars seem prescient along a number of dimensions. He was less fixated than these others on language; he worked harder to find a place for genuinely internal mental states in a physicalist framework; he paid more attention to perception, as an issue both in the philosophy of mind and in epistemology; and he tried harder to integrate scientific discovery with our commonsense and philosophical projects. In addition, his influence on contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind — if not on contemporary philosophy more generally — exceeds that of the others; the moves we make today in debates in general epistemology, the epistemology and philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of mind more generally, are frequently deeply indebted to Sellars. Finally, his influence seems to have not yet fully peaked; he may be the only one on the above list who fails to satisfy a criterion I once heard (due to Mike Harnish) for counting as a historical figure in philosophy: ‘he’s dead, and nobody believes it anymore’.