In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays

by Wilfrid Sellars, Kevin Scharp (Editor), Robert B. Brandom (Editor)

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was, Richard Rorty writes, "as original a mind as C. S. Peirce, and it has taken almost as long for the importance of his ideas to be appreciated." This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.

The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates what Robert Brandom calls the "inferentialist" conception of meaning at the heart of his work. This conception, laid out in the early essays, is deployed in various epistemological contexts throughout the book so that, upon arriving at the concluding papers on Kant, the reader has been given a tour d'horizon not only of the central topics of philosophy of mind and language, but of much of the history of philosophy as well—and, with this, a sense of what a shifting of analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian stage would entail.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2007

About the author

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 - July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the noted Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at Michigan, the University of Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology, but his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. He was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.

Robert Brandom, his junior colleague at Pittsburgh, named Sellars and Willard van Orman Quine as the two most profound and important philosophers of their generation. Sellars' goal of a synoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the "Pittsburgh School", whose members include Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland. Other philosophers strongly influenced by Sellars span the full spectrum of contemporary English-speaking philosophy, from neopragmatism (Richard Rorty) to eliminative materialism (Paul Churchland) to rationalism (Laurence BonJour). Sellars' philosophical heirs also include Hector-Neri Castaneda, Bruce Aune, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Andrew Chrucky, Jeffrey Sicha, Pedro Amaral, Thomas Vinci, Willem de Vries, Timm Triplett, and Michael Williams.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of essays from Wilfrid Sellars--perhaps the best collection of primary sources for one interested in coming to terms with this difficult author.
This collection of essays is *perhaps* not his best collection (I really like 'Science, Perception, and Reality' as well as 'Philosophical Perspectives'), but it is without a doubt the best collection of his essays for one who is unacquainted with the Sellarsian corpus.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps in another lifetime we could’ve been happy together, Wilfrid. Perhaps somewhere out there you and I are smiling, walking through the pages of Kant hand-in-hand. But not now, and not here.

[saml · Rating 5 out of 5]

Serene. I find his style troubling at times, and struggle to see the totality of his project in any coherence (e.g. the puzzling semantic-role nominalism). I am deathly impressed though. Sellars gives the impression of knowing lots, which is perhaps a bad sign for his style, if anything. But I cannot help but be suckered in.