Description: Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading critics of empiricism--a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Robert Brandom clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.
Brief description: Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism (all from Harvard).
Review Quotes: One of the leading U.S. philosophers, Brandom develops his systematic views about language, knowledge, and the mind through a fascinating conversation with the work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), who influenced English-language philosophy as much as any 20th-century thinker. In Brandom's hands, the criticisms of empiricism Sellars developed are transformed into a set of powerfully coherent views... Brandom's scrupulous, illuminating discussion of Sellars's search for a pragmatic and naturalistic alternative to empiricism should forever establish Sellars's lasting importance to analytic philosophy. This inspired interpretation of Sellars gradually transitions, chapter by chapter, into Brandom's thorough development of his own theory of pragmatic expressivism. As a masterwork of late analytic philosophy, this book must be studied as closely as Sellars by those interested in philosophy and linguistics.--J. R. Shook "Choice" (10/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)