Wilfrid Sellars

1912-1989 · American · Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Kantian Philosophy

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

Wilfrid Sellars grew up inside philosophy — his father was a prominent American philosopher — and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before spending most of his career at Pittsburgh. There he anchored what his students — Robert Brandom and John McDowell among them — would call the "Pittsburgh school," one of analytic philosophy's most consequential lineages.

Topics Wilfrid Sellars addresses

• the myth of the given
• the space of reasons
• psychological nominalism
• the manifest image
• the scientific image
• the synoptic vision
• the Jonesian myth
• picturing and language-world isomorphism
• scientific realism on theoretical entities
• inner episodes as theoretical posits
• the logic of looks
• sense-datum theories and their ambiguity
• does empirical knowledge have a foundation?
• the framework of persons
• categorial frameworks
• inferentialism and semantics
• knowledge as placement in normative space
• thoughts as inner-speech analogues
• sensations as theoretical posits
• impressions and ideas
• the logic of private episodes
• intentionality and aboutness
• sensory consciousness
• methodological vs philosophical behaviorism

Converse with Wilfrid Sellars on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Wilfrid Sellars's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.