Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism

The ten essays in this collection were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lectures which became Wilfrid Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy. Both appreciative and critical of Sellars's accomplishment, they engage with his treatment of crucial issues in metaphysics and epistemology. The topics include the standing of empiricism, Sellars's complex treatment of perception, his dissatisfaction with both foundationalist and coherentist epistemologies, his commitment to realism, and the status of the normative (the "logical space of reasons" and the "manifest image"). The volume shows how vibrant Sellarsian philosophy remains in the 21st century.

Willem deVries is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. He was a student of Wilfrid Sellars' and has published extensively on his work.

- Introduction - 1: John McDowell: Why Is Sellars's Essay Called Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind? - 2: Robert B. Brandom: Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars's Arguments against Empiricism - 3: Paul Coates: Perception, Imagination and Demonstrative Reference: A Sellarsian Account - 4: Paul Snowdon: Some Sellarsian Myths - 5: Willem A. deVries and Paul Coates: Brandom's Two-Ply Error - 6: Michael Williams: The Tortoise and the Serpent: Sellars on the Structure of Empirical Knowledge - 7: James R. O'Shea: On the Structure of Sellars' Naturalism with a Normative Turn - 8: Willem A. deVries: Getting Beyond Idealisms - 9: Johanna Seibt: Functions Between Reasons and Causes: On Picturing - 10: Jay F. Rosenberg: On Sellars' Two Images Of The World - Notes