20th Century Philosophy > 20th Century Analytic Philosophy > Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars

Edited by Willem A. DeVries (University of New Hampshire, Durham)
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Summary

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912-1989) was a profound philosopher who left an indelible mark on mid-to-late 20th century Anglo-American philosophy. His stated goal was "to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would ‘save the appearances,’" and towards this end he wrote a number of essays that covered topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics, as well as in the history of philosophy. Sellars was broadly educated in philosophy, drawing influences from ancient philosophy, German Idealism, logical positivism, critical realism, and ordinary language philosophy. His work was imbued with a deep respect for philosophy’s history. He is most famous for his attack on the "myth of the given" and his development of a non-foundationalistic epistemology, for his distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of humanity in the world, for his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and for his scientific realism. Sellars can claim the first explicit formulation of a functionalist treatment of intentional states, an early recognition of the "hard problem" of sensory consciousness, and a thoroughgoing nominalism, as well as rich interpretations of historical figures in philosophy.
Key works

Sellars’s best-known essay is [Sellars 1956 "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind."], considered a classic of 20th century philosophy.  Other landmark essays include [Sellars 1962 "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man"], [Sellars 1954 "Some Reflections on Language Games"], [Sellars 1963 "Abstract Entities"],  [Sellars 1974 "Meaning as Functional Classification"], [Sellars 1957 "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities"],  [Sellars 1981 "Foundations of a Metaphysics of Pure Process"], [Sellars 1969 "Language as Thought and as Communication"], [Sellars 1981"Mental Events"], [Sellars 1982 "Sensa or Sensings"], [Sellars 1980 "On Reasoning about Values"], and his book [Sellars 1968 "Science and Metaphysics"]
Introductions Richard J. Bernstein "Sellars' Vision of Man-in-the-Universe," Bernstein 1966 Bernstein 1966 deVries 2011  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Wilfrid Sellars" deVries & Triplett 2000 deVries&Triplett, Knowledge, Mind and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" DeVries 2005  deVries, Wilfrid Sellars O'Shea 2007  O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars:  Naturalism with a Normative Turn Delaney et al 1977 Delaney, Loux, et al., The Synoptic Vision
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  1. The Enigma of Rules.Jaroslav Peregrin - 2010 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3):377-394.
    In a remarkable early paper, Wilfrid Sellars warned us that if we cease to recognize rules, we may well find ourselves walking on four feet; and it is obvious that within human communities, the phenomenon of rules is ubiquitous. Yet from the viewpoint of the sciences, rules cannot be easily accounted for. Sellars himself, during his later years, managed to put a lot of flesh on the normative bones from which he assembled the remarkable skeleton of the early paper; and (...)
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  2. Feigl, Sellars, and the Idea of a 'Pure Pragmatics'.Matthias Neuber - manuscript
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  3. Comment on Sellars' view of philosophy.Andrew Chrucky - manuscript
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  4. Ist die Wissenschaft das Maß aller Dinge? Eine phänomenologische Kritik an Sellars’ Ansatz.Vittorio De Palma - forthcoming - Bulletin d'Analyse Phénoménologique.
    In view of the incompatibility between scientific and manifest image one can either consider the scientific world as true and the sensuous world as merely subjective or consider the latter as true and the former as a subjective construction. Sellars holds the first position, namely scientific realism. By relying on Husserl, who holds the second position, I try to show that the first position has absurd consequences and is idealistic. For the measure of all things is not science, but perception.
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  5. On Sellars’s Analytic-Kantian Conception of Categories as Classifying Conceptual Roles.James O'Shea - forthcoming - In Javier Cumpa (ed.), Categorial Ontologies: From Realism to Eliminativism. Routledge.
    ABSTRACT: I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends a long line of nominalistic thinking about the nature of the categories from Ockham and Kant to the Tractatus and Carnap, and that this theory is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’s most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human (...)
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  6. Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy: The ‘Analytic’ Tradition.James O'Shea - forthcoming - In Sorin Baiasu & Mark Timmons (eds.), The Kantian Mind. Routledge.
    ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis for (...)
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  7. Foucault, Sellars, and the “conditions of possibility” of science.Marco Piasentier - forthcoming - Philosophy and Social Criticism.
    Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dic...
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  8. Foucault, Sellars, and the “conditions of possibility” of science.Marco Piasentier - forthcoming - Philosophy and Social Criticism.
    Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical (...)
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  9. Foucault, Sellars, and the “conditions of possibility” of science.Marco Piasentier - forthcoming - Philosophy and Social Criticism.
    Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is (...)
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  10. Wilfrid Sellars' Anti-Descriptivism.Kevin Scharp - forthcoming - In Koskinen (ed.), Categories of Being.
    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’ (...)
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  11. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions.Daniele De Santis & Danilo Manca (eds.) - 2023
    Wilfrid Sellars tackled the difficult problems of reconciling Pittsburgh school-style analytic thought, Husserlian phenomenology, and the Myth of the Given. This collection of essays brings into dialogue the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars--founder of the Pittsburgh school of thought--and phenomenology, with a special focus on the work of Edmund Husserl. The book's wide-ranging discussions include the famous Myth of the Given but also more traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology such as the status of perception and imagination (...)
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  12. Ethics, practical reasoning, agency: Wilfrid Sellars's practical philosophy.Jeremy Randel Koons & Ronald Loeffler (eds.) - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    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 (...)
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  13. Wilfrid Sellars on Science and the Mind.Anke Breunig - 2022 - Philosophical Topics 50 (1):235-261.
    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 (...)
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  14. Demystifying the myth of sensation: Wilfrid Sellars’ adverbialism reconsidered.Luca Corti - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-21.
    This paper reconstructs and defends a Sellarsian approach to “sensation” that allows us to avoid mythological conceptions of it. Part I reconstructs and isolates Sellars’s argument for “sensation,” situating his adverbial interpretation of the notion within his broader theory of perception. Part II positions Sellars’s views vis-à-vis current conversations on adverbalism. In particular, it focuses on the Many Property Problem, which is traditionally considered the main obstacle to adverbialism. After reconstructing Sellars’s response to this problem, I demonstrate that his position (...)
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  15. Idealism, quietism, conceptual change: Sellars and McDowell on the knowability of the world.Michael R. Hicks - 2022 - Giornali di Metafisica 44 (1):51-71.
    Both Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell reject Kant’s conclusion that the world is fundamentally unknowable, and on similar grounds: each invokes conceptual change, what I call the diachronic instability of a conceptual scheme. The similarities end there, though. It is important to Sellars that the world is only knowable at “the end of inquiry” – he rejects a commonsense realism like McDowell’s for its inability to fully appreciate diachronic instability. To evaluate this disagreement, I consider Timothy Williamson’s argument that the (...)
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  16. Fundarentismo e o dilema de Sellars.Mateus Jurkovski - 2022 - Dissertation, Uffs, Brazil
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  17. Sellars's Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness.Griffin Klemick - 2022 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.
    Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is original about EPM (...)
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  18. Sellars on compatibilism and the consequence argument.Jeremy Randel Koons - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (7):2361-2389.
    No contemporary compatibilist account of free will can be complete unless it engages with the consequence argument. I will argue that Wilfrid Sellars offered an ingenious version of compatibilism that can be used to refute the consequence argument. Unfortunately, owing to the opacity of Sellars’s writings on free will, his solution has been neglected. I will reconstruct his view here, demonstrating how it represents a powerful challenge to the consequence argument and tying it to some recent developments in the compatibilist (...)
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  19. The Role of Picturing In Sellars’s Practical Philosophy.Jeremy Randel Koons & Carl B. Sachs - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Research 47:147-176.
    Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars’s philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the (...)
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  20. Kant and Sellars on the Unity of Apperception.David Landy - 2022 - Philosophical Inquiries 10 (1):49-72.
    That Wilfrid Sellars claims that the framework of persons is not a descriptive framework, but a normative one is about as well known as any claim that he makes. This claim is at the core of the famous demand for a synoptic image that closes, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” makes its appearance at key moments in the grand argument of, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” and is the capstone of Sellars’ engagement with Kant in, Science and (...)
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  21. A Cybernetic Theory of Persons: How and Why Sellars Naturalized Kant.Carl B. Sachs - 2022 - Philosophical Inquiries 10 (1).
    I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...)
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  22. Sellars's ontological nominalism.Ryan Simonelli - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1041-1061.
    Wilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls “nominalism.” On the one hand, there is his “psychological nominalism,” according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities—be they properties, relations, or facts—is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is fundamentally a world of concrete (...)
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  23. The Pittsburgh Kantians: Brandom, Conant, Haugeland, and McDowell on Kant.Jacob Browning - 2021 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis:1-32.
    Over the last thirty years, a group of philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh—Robert Brandom, James Conant, John Haugeland, and John McDowell—have developed a novel reading of Kant. Their interest turns on Kant’s problem of objective purport: how can my thoughts be about the world? This paper summarizes the shared reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction by these four philosophers and how it solves the problem of objective purport. But I also show these philosophers radically diverge in how they view (...)
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  24. Sellars, we-intentions and ought-statements.Stefanie Dach - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4415-4439.
    My paper is concerned with the relation between ought-statements and intentions in Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy. According to an entrenched view in Sellars scholarship, Sellars considers ought-statements as expressions of we-intentions. The aim of my paper is to question this reading and to propose an alternative. According to this alternative reading of Sellars, ought-statements are metalinguistic statements about the implication relations between intentions. I show that the entrenched understanding faces many unacknowledged problems and generates incompatibilities with Sellars’s commitments about intentions. I (...)
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  25. Cassirer’s Influence on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars.Tobias Endres - 2021 - Cassirer Studies 13 (XIII/XIV-2020/2021):149-170.
    The aim of the paper is to highlight a hidden reception of Ernst Cassirer’s works in the writings of Wilfrid Sellars. To set out such reception, I will begin with defining criteria that allow us to point out a possible influence from one thinker on another. In a second step, I will present several links between the set-out criteria and the constellation Sellars-Cassirer. Finally, the Cassirer Lectures Series at Yale, Sellars’ review of Language and Myth as well as Sellars’ lecture (...)
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  26. Béatrice Longuenesse and Ned Block Vide Kant.Ekin Erkan - 2021 - Cosmos and History 17 (1):405-452.
    Understanding, for Kant, does not intuit, and intuition—which involves empirical information, i.e., sense-data—does not entail thinking. What is crucial to Kant’s famous claim that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty is the idea that we have no knowledge unless we combine concepts with intuition. Although concepts and intuition are radically separated mental powers, without a way of bringing them together (i.e., synthesis) there is no knowledge for Kant. Thus Kant’s metaphysical-scientific dualism: (scientific) knowledge is limited (...)
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  27. Westphal, Kenneth, Kant’s Critical Epistemology: Why Epistemology Must Consider Judgment First. [REVIEW]Ekin Erkan - 2021 - Argumenta 12:366-373.
    Book Review of Kenneth Westphal's Kant’s Critical Epistemology: Why Epistemology Must Consider Judgment First.
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  28. Wilfrid Sellars and the task of philosophy.Michael R. Hicks - 2021 - Synthese 198 (10):9373-9400.
    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 (...)
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  29. Inferentialism and semantic externalism: a neglected debate between Sellars and Putnam.Takaaki Matsui - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (1):126-145.
    In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of (...)
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  30. Tropes variations: the topic of particulars beyond Sellars’s myth of the given.Antonio M. Nunziante - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12019-12043.
    The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to bring into the light the almost unexplored Sellars’s theory of particulars. Second, I would like to show its surprising degree of compatibility with the thesis supported by some contemporary tropists, Tropes, Universals and the Philosophy of Mind, Ontos Verlag, 2008; Moltmann, Mind 113:1–41, 2004 and Moltmann, Noûs 47:346–370, 2013). It is difficult to establish whether Sellars possessed an own theory of tropes, developed independently by the classical form it (...)
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  31. Vygotsky’s Janus-Faced Theory of Language: A Reply to Drain’s ‘Tomasello, Vygotsky, and the Phylogenesis of Mind’.K. Potapov - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.
    In his lucid and helpful reply, Chris Drain (2021) clarifies some of his views and aims and offers pertinent criticisms of my own. Drain refocuses my forays into Pittsburgh Hegelianism onto Vygotsky’s own thought. He rightly notes that Brandom’s account of deontic scorekeeping tells us nothing about phylogenesis. Sellars too has little to say about the origins of language and social practice and I would endorse the projects of those who turn to Tomasello to fill such gaps (Koons 2018). However, (...)
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  32. Objectification and the Labour of the Negative in the Origin of Human Thinking: A Response to Chris Drain.Kyrill Potapov - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.
    After reading the stimulating exchange between Chris Drain and Siyaves Azeri, I wanted to reply to Drain from a slightly different angle. Drain’s latest response takes aim at what Vygotsky calls his general genetic law of development, which Drain suggests should be updated through an appreciation of Tomasello and Searle’s concept of “joint intentionality”. At the heart of Vygotsky’s thought is the claim that “every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, (...)
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  33. Intentionality in Sellars: A Transcendental Account of Finite Knowledge.Luz Christopher Seiberth - 2021 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book argues that Sellars' theory of intentionality can be understood as an advancement of a transcendental philosophical approach. It shows how Sellars develops his theory of intentionality through his engagement with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The book delivers a provocative reinterpretation of one of the most problematic and controversial concepts of Sellars' philosophy: the picturing-relation. Sellars' theory of intentionality addresses the question of how to reconcile two aspects that seem opposed: the non-relational theory of intellectual and linguistic (...)
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  34. Some Remarks on Kant's Theory of Experience (Translated by M. Evstigneev).Wilfrid Sellars - 2021 - Studies in Transcendental Philosophy 2 (1).
    Kant never tires of telling us that Nature and the Space and Time which are its forms exist as a system of “representations.” Now a prepresentation is either a representing or a something represented. Does Kant mean that nature is a system of representings? Or that it is a system of representeds? And, in any case, what would the claim amount to? (Sellars W. (1974) Some Remarks on Kant’s Theory of Experience. In: Essays in Philosophy and Its History. Philosophical Studies (...)
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  35. Experience and the Space of Reasons.Mohammad Azadpur - 2020 - Sophia Perennis 17 (37):5-35.
    Throughout their writings, John McDowell and Richard Rorty draw on Kant’s influential account of experience. For Rorty, Kant is the antagonist who succumbs to foundationalism or what Sellars calls the Myth of the Given and Wittgenstein is the hero who helps in overcoming the siren call of the Myth. McDowell, however, is ambivalent toward Kant. With Sellars, he applauds Kant as the hero who helped us vanquish the Myth of the Given. But he argues that Kant failed to recognize the (...)
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  36. Metaethical Intentionalism and the Intersubjectivity of Morals.Kyle Ferguson - 2020 - Dissertation, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
    I defend a thesis called metaethical intentionalism, according to which deontic moral judgments (“ought” judgments) are intersubjective intentions or verbal expressions of intersubjective intentions. They have the form, “We shall any of us do A in C,” or are derivable from such practical commitments. They are universalizable by virtue of their content (“… any of us …”) and sharable by virtue of their form (“We …”). My account of the moral “ought” is inspired by the moral writings of Wilfrid Sellars (...)
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  37. Sellars, Price, and the Myth of the Given.Michael R. Hicks - 2020 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (7).
    Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars's argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars's 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars's teacher at Oxford and the only classical (...)
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  38. Rule-following practices in a natural world.Wolfgang Huemer - 2020 - Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1 (1):161-181.
    I address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term "naturalism" is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars (...)
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  39. Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism.Griffin Klemick - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2215-2243.
    In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as correct (...)
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  40. How Pragmatist was Sellars? Reflections on an Analytic Pragmatism.James O'Shea - 2020 - In Stefan Brandt & Anke Breunig (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 110–29.
    ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its motivation and in its content, whether considered conceptually, historically, or in his own estimation, and that this is the case even in the important respects in which his views differ from most pragmatists. However, this assessment has been rejected by many recent pragmatists, with “classicalist” pragmatists frequently objecting to Sellars’s analytic-pragmatist privileging of language at the alleged expense of experience, while many analytic pragmatists themselves emphasize (...)
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  41. Phenomenology vs the Myth of the Given: A Sellarsian Perspective on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.Carl B. Sachs - 2020 - Discipline filosofiche. 30 (1):287-301.
    I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. This (...)
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  42. Sellars, Truth Pluralism, and Truth Relativism.Lionel Shapiro - 2020 - In Stefan Brandt & Anke Breunig (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 174–206.
    Two currently much discussed views about truth, truth pluralism and truth relativism, are found in Sellars’s writings. I show that his motivations for adoping these views are interestingly different from those shared by most of their recent advocates. First, I explain how Sellars comes to embrace a version of truth pluralism. I argue that his version overcomes a difficulty confronting pluralists, albeit at a serious cost. Then I argue that Sellars’s truth pluralism isn’t motivated by his interest in domains of (...)
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  43. Givenness as a Corollary to Non-Conceptual Awareness: Thinking about Thought in Buddhist Philosophy.Dan Arnold - 2019 - In Jay Garfield (ed.), Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 130-156.
    This article aims to show why Sellars' critique of epistemic givenness has proven so apt in characterizing the philosophical problems that confront the project of Dignaga and Dharmakirti -- problem that result from the etent to whih these buddhists valorized "non-conceptual awareness.
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  44. Historische Stationen: Das 20. Jahrhundert.Anke Breunig - 2019 - In Handbuch Erkenntnistheorie. Metzler. pp. 50-57.
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  45. Von Grund zu Grund. Zum Zusammenhang von Denken und Wissen bei Wilfrid Sellars.Anke Breunig - 2019 - Paderborn: mentis.
    Foundationalism about intentionality parallels foundationalism about epistemic justification. Reassessing Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given, the author argues that both views are inadequate, and for similar reasons. She explores the relation between meaning and knowledge, develops a new argument against the Given, and sketches how Sellars and Carnap perform the linguistic turn differently. -/- Wie ist Wissen begründet? Wie bezieht sich Geist auf die Welt? Nach der hier ausgearbeiteten neuen Interpretation von Wilfrid Sellars’ Kritik am „Mythos des Gegebenen“ (...)
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  46. Two Tables, Images, and Truth.Monima Chadha - 2019 - In Jay Garfield (ed.), Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 32-47.
    The relations between Sellars' two 'images' of man-in-the-world and the Ahidharma doctrine of two truths.
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  47. Hegel and Sellars on the Unity of Things.Willem A. deVries - 2019 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (3):363-378.
    ABSTRACTI have claimed previously that Hegel and Sellars are both, in the end, monistic visionaries, though with radically different visions of the grand unity of things. In this paper I explain an...
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  48. Mr. Jones and the Surpluses of Reality.Thomas Doctor - 2019 - In Jay Garfield (ed.), Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 216-230.
    This chapter suggests that Sellars' account of subjectivity as socially constructed, and hence conceptual at its illusory roots, presents a crisp and compelling perspective on cognitive life that captures Buddhist conceptions of transformative non-duality.
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  49. Sellars and the Stereoscopic Vision of Madhyamaka.Douglas Duckworth - 2019 - In Jay Garfield (ed.), Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 67-79.
    This chapter puts Sellars' project of unifying his two images in conversation with that of understanding how the two truth, the conventional and ultimate truth, are related in Buddhism, and in Madhyamaka in particular.
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  50. Givenness and Primal Confusion.Jay Garfield - 2019 - In Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 113-129.
    Sellars' critique of the myth of the given can help us understand the epistemology of consciousness in Madhyamaka and Yogacara thought.
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