Richard Rorty

Robert Brandom

Wilfrid Sellars

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. This publication makes comprehensible a difficult but important figure in this movement.

Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

Science, Perception and Reality

Pedro V. Amaral

Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars

Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes

Willem A. Devries

Timm Triplett

Reading Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Including the Complete Text of Sellars's Essay

Knowledge, Mind, and the Given 

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Metaphysics and Epistemology

Philosophical Perspectives

Naturalism and Ontology

Variations on Kantian Themes

Science and Metaphysics

Rudolf Carnap

Otto Neurath

John Von Neumann

Marguerite Young

Max Black

Herbert Feigl

Reinhardt Grossmann

Erwin Tegtmeier

Philipp Frank

Herbert Hochberg

Alexius Meinong

Adolf Grünbaum

Gustav Bergmann

William Henry Hay

William Smith Heald

Edwin Bonar Allaire

May Brodbeck

Rosaria Egidi

Alan Michael Hausmann

Philosophers discussed include Franz Brentano, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Correspondents include May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl, John von Neumann, and Marguerite Young.

Papers of Gustav Bergmann

Eugene Freeman

Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time

New Readings in Philosophical Analysis

In pulling these essays together for inclusion in one volume I do not believe that I have done them violence. Since they originally appeared at different times and places they constitute a scattered object. Never theless, to the author's eye they have unities of theme and development which, if they fail to give them the true identity of the book, may (to adapt a metaphor from Hume) generate those smooth and easy transi tions of the imagination which arouse dispositions appropriate to sur veying such identical objects. For the juxtaposition of historical and systematic studies I make no apology. It has been suggested, with a friendly touch of malice, that if Science and Metaphysics consists, as its subtitle proclaims, of Variations on Kantian Themes, it would be no less accurate to sub-title my historical essays 'variations on Sellars ian themes'. But this is as it should be. Phi losophy is a continuing dialogue with one's contemporaries, living and dead, and if one fails to see oneself in one's respondent and one's re spondent in oneself, there is confrontation but no dialogue. The historian, as Collingwood points out, becomes Caesar's contemporary by learning to think Caesar's thoughts. And it is because Plato thought so many of our thoughts that he is our contemporary and companion.

Essays in Philosophy and Its History

Wilfrid Sellars

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