1st Edition
Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy
This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars’s thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book’s final section extracts some of the most significant lessons Sellars’s work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience.
Introduction
Stefan Brandt and Anke Breunig
Part I: Influences
1. Cook Wilson, Sellars, and the Explication of Language
Boris Brandhoff
2. Sellars’s Twist on Carnap’s Syntax
Anke Breunig
3. Ajdukiewicz and Sellars on World Perspectives
Peter Olen
4. Sellars and Wittgenstein on Following a Rule
Stefan Brandt
Part II: Sellars and the Analytic Tradition
5. Wilfrid Sellars as an Analytic Philosopher
Tadeusz Szubka
6. How Pragmatist was Sellars? Reflections on an Analytic Pragmatism
James R. O’Shea
7. Transcendental Principles and Perceptual Warrant: A Case Study in Analytic Kantianism
Johannes Haag
Part III: Learning from Sellars
8. Sellars on Inference
Johannes Hübner
9. Sellars, Truth Pluralism, and Truth Relativism
Lionel Shapiro
10. Some Remarks on Sellars’s Theory of Experience
Willem A. deVries
11. Sellars on Self-Knowledge
Franz Knappik
Biography
Stefan Brandt is Assistant Professor at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. His work has been published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and Philosophical Investigations.
Anke Breunig is Assistant Professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
"In sum, Brandt and Breunig have succeeded in putting together a variegated and solid collection, which constitutes a useful addition to our ongoing scholarly engagement with Sellars. The volume makes an important contribution to the project of obtaining a synoptic view of his thought, both from a historical and philosophical point of view, and will certainly encourage further research in the field."
Luca Corti, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
