Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy

Wilfrid Sellars made profound and lasting contributions to nearly every area of philosophy. The aim of this collection is to highlight the continuing importance of Sellars’ work to contemporary debates. The contributors include several luminaries in Sellars scholarship, as well as members of the new generation whose work demonstrates the lasting power of Sellars’ ideas. Papers by O’Shea and Koons develop Sellars’ underexplored views concerning ethics, practical reasoning, and free will, with an emphasis on his longstanding engagement with Kant. Sachs, Hicks and Pereplyotchik relate Sellars’ views of mental phenomena to current topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Fink, deVries, Price, Macbeth, Christias, and Brandom grapple with traditional Sellarsian themes, including meaning, truth, existence, and objectivity. Brandhoff provides an original account of the evolution of Sellars’ philosophy of language and his project of "pure pragmatics". The volume concludes with an author-meets-critics section centered around Robert Brandom’s recent book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, with original commentaries and replies.

David Pereplyotchik is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy, with a concentration in cognitive science, from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and Its Place in the Mind (2017) and is an active member of the Wilfrid Sellars Society.

Deborah R. Barnbaum is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Kent State University. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts in 1996. She is the author of The Ethics of Autism (2008) and the co-author of Research Ethics: Text and Readings, with Michael Byron (2001).