From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents Title Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Categories and Noumena: Two Kantian Axes of Sellars’s Thought Chapter 2. The Centrality of Sellars’s Two-Ply Account of Observation to the Arguments of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Chapter 3. Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism Chapter 4. Modality and Normativity: From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars Chapter 5. Modal Expressivism and Modal Realism: Together Again Chapter 6. Sortals, Identity, and Modality: The Metaphysical Significance of the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis Chapter 7. Sellars’s Metalinguistic Expressivist Nominalism Credits Index

About the Author :
Brandom Robert B. : Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Review :
From Empiricism to Expressivism offers an original, critical reading of Sellars and a constructive extension of some of Sellars's most important ideas. As a contribution to the literature on Sellars, Robert Brandom's book has no competitor; there are excellent general introductions to Sellars's philosophical thought, but Brandom's work is on a different level. It is philosophically adventurous, a superb piece of deep exegesis, and a first rate work of philosophy. -- Michael Williams, Johns Hopkins University From Empiricism to Expressivism is a coherently developed and highly original interpretation of Sellars's philosophy, read in a way that simultaneously defends Brandom's own very widely discussed analytic pragmatism. One of the most important achievements of the book is to unify and extend crucial 'metalinguistic' aspects of Sellars's work that were central to some of Sellars's most influential views about meaning, normativity, and modality, but key aspects of which received only scattered and uneven treatment in Sellars's own writings. This book represents the most sophisticated and penetrating interpretation of Sellars's philosophy available, past and present. -- James O'Shea, University College Dublin 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