1st Edition
Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency Wilfrid Sellars’s Practical Philosophy
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 address this neglected area of Sellars’s philosophy. The chapters are divided into thematic sections covering Sellars’s theory of we-intentions – influential in contemporary debates on collective intentionality – naturalism and the manifest image, and the moral point of view. Together, they demonstrate how Sellars’s practical philosophy contributes to important debates in contemporary philosophy regarding, for example, expressivist approaches to moral thought and group agency in the collective intentionality literature.
Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars’s Practical Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in Wilfrid Sellars, American philosophy, and ethics.
Introduction Jeremy Randel Koons and Ronald Loeffler
Part 1: Understanding Sellarsian We-intentions
1. Sellars on the Intersubjectivity of We-Intentions Stefanie Dach
2. We-Intentions and How One Reports Them Kyle Ferguson
3. Moral We-Intentions as Individualistic We-Attitudes Ronald Loeffler
4. Cracks in the Foundation: An Anscombean Critique of Sellars’s Practical Philosophy Heath White
Part 2: Naturalism and the Manifest Image: Extensions and Critical Engagements
5. Persons and Their Categories Willem A. Devries
6. ‘Causal Reducibility’ and Naturalism in Sellars’s Conception of the Moral ‘Ought’ James R. O’shea
7. Norm, Nature, and Narrative: Stereoscopic Vision in Sellars and Danielle Macbeth Zachary Gabor
8. Practical Cognition, Motor Intentionality, and the Idea of the Good: Considerations of Denotational and Connotational Meaning Preston Stovall
Part 3: The Moral Point of View and the Kingdom of Ends
9. The Community of Rational Beings Nicholas Tebben
10. Morality, Tribalism, and Value Danielle Macbeth
11. Sellars on External Reasons Jeremy Randel Koons.
Index
Biography
Jeremy Randel Koons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University – Qatar. He is the author of The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars (Routledge, 2019), and the author or co-author of two additional books as well as two dozen articles and book chapters on metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.
Ronald Loeffler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University, USA. He is the author of Brandom (2018) and of articles in the philosophy of mind and language.
"This is an exciting new volume on Wilfrid Sellars’s practical philosophy. Koons and Loeffler have done an excellent job assembling a prominent group of scholars to shed light on this under-discussed area of Sellars’s philosophy. Anyone interested in Sellars, ethics, or practical reasoning will be well-served by exploring this volume."
Peter Olen, Lake-Sumter State College, USA
