While Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy is often depicted in an ahistorical fashion, this book explores the consequences of placing his work in its historical context. In order to show how Sellars’ early publications depend on contextual factors, Peter Olen reconstructs the conceptions of language, psychological, and social explanation that dominated American philosophy in the early 20th century. Because of Sellars’ differing explanations of language and behaviour, Olen argues that many of Sellars’ early commitments are incompatible with his later works. In the (...) course of doing so, Olen highlights problematic tensions between Sellars’ early and later conceptions of language, meta-philosophy, and normativity. Supplementing the main text is a collection of previously unpublished archival material from Wilfrid Sellars, Gustav Bergmann, Everett Hall, and other early 20th century philosophers. This text will be a useful resource to those with an interest in the history of American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy, and the myriad issues surrounding normativity and language. (shrink)

The attempt to draw a clear distinction between Philosophy and the empirical sciences can almost be taken as the defining trait of the analytic movement in contemporary philosophical thought. The empirical science that has most frequently threatened to swallow up questions of particular interest to philosophers since the time of Descartes has been psychology. Characteristic, then, of analytic philosophy has been the rejection of what it terms psychologism, that is to say, the mistake of identifying philosophical categories with those of (...) psychology, whether introspective or behavioristic. It is clear that to launch an attack on psychologism, thus conceived, presupposes that one has a list of philosophical categories which one is able to identify as such; and this in turn presupposes an ability to sketch, at least in a general way, a distinctly philosophical account of these concepts, although a systematic account along non-psychologistic lines may be a distant and ill-defined goal. The analytic movement in philosophy has gradually moved towards the conclusion that the defining characteristic of philosophical concepts is that they are formal concepts relating to the formation and transformation rules of symbol structures called languages. Philosophy, in other words, tends to be conceived of as the formal theory of languages. From this standpoint, consequently, psychologism is conceived of as the psychological treatment of concepts which are properly understood as formal devices defining a mode of linguistic structure. (shrink)