Sellars, Wilfrid S.: In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars.

deVries, Willem A.

SELLARS, Wilfrid S. In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars. Edited by Kevin Scharp and Robert B. Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. xxviii + 491 pp. Cloth, $45.00--The editors of this volume boldly proclaim Sellars to be the greatest American philosopher since C. S. Peirce. They are probably right, but this is a minority opinion, as the state of Sellars's oeuvre attests. The original publishers of Sellars's principal books have let them go out of print. A small house, Ridgeview Publishing, originally published Naturalism and Ontology, and has valiantly republished Sellars's other works and even added collections of Sellars's early essays, his work on Kant, and editions of Sellars's lectures on Kant and on epistemology. Slowly, Sellars is emerging from his relative neglect. Sellars's well known essay, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" [EPM] is now available in two editions: one from Harvard, edited by Brandom, and another from Hackett, with a substantial commentary by deVries and Triplett. With In the Space of Reasons more of Sellars returns to the list of a major academic publisher.

This volume aims to collect "the papers most important for understanding the core of [Sellars's] synoptic philosophical vision" (p. vii). It clearly bears the stamp of Brandom's focus on "the metaphysics of intentionality." Seventeen essays are included in 5 parts: "Language and Meaning," "Abstract Entities," "Mind, Language, and the World," "Science and the Mind," and a final section of historical essays on Kant. Sellars published around 100 essays, so this is still very much a selection. Six of the essays originally appeared in Sellars's 1963 collection Science, Perception and Reality [SPR]. Of the other 11 essays here, only one predates SPR, "Inference and Meaning" (a major influence on Brandom). The essays complement each other across as well as within the sections. Sellars had a comprehensive philosophical view, but his individual essays contain no more than partial perspectives of the complex whole viewed in the light of a particular issue. Read together, the multi-dimensional solidity of his philosophy emerges.

The essays form a good introduction to Sellars's vision, and I am particularly pleased that attention is given to his treatment of abstract entities, but there are omissions. Sellars's historical essays (other than a few on Kant) and his essays in ethics are notably absent. These are two areas that separate Sellars from other American luminaries, for example, Quine and Davidson. That Sellars's extensive historical writings (never merely philological exercises) could not be included is understandable. But omitting Sellars's essays on ethics and values is a tremendous pity, for at the very core of Sellars's synoptic vision is the distinction between empirical description and normative prescription, and it is in these essays (for example, "On Reasoning about Values") that he examines the logic of prescriptive discourse.

Given the influence of EPM on contemporary epistemology, it is surprising that epistemology is not more prominent in the collection, perhaps via "The Structure of Knowledge". Similarly, though Sellars was an important philosopher of science widely known for his scientific realism, there are only traces of these issues here.

These are regrettable omissions, not because Scharp and Brandom chose the wrong essays, but because no one (reasonable) volume could do justice to Sellars's thought. Let us hope this volume does well enough to justify a second volume in which these omissions can be made good.

One omission is culpable: there is no bibliography of Sellars's works. Even a partial bibliography of other significant works would have been tremendously helpful. Thankfully, a complete bibliography along with a large number of secondary resources is available on line at the "Problems from Wilfrid Sellars" website: http://www.ditext.com/sellars/. On the positive side, the volume is thoroughly indexed, which will be extremely valuable for close work on these essays.

The editors' introduction to this volume is brief and consists mostly of thumbnail sketches of the essays. These thumbnails are sometimes frustratingly sketchy and occasionally inaccurate. At one point it is claimed that in his treatment of singular distributive terms, Sellars believes "'the lion is tawny' is sense-equivalent to 'all lions are necessarily tawny'" (p. xvi), but this is a much stronger claim than Sellars himself ever commits to. The editors also claim that Sellars's famous Ryleans--protopersons who have not yet become conscious of their own psychologies--"perform only linguistic acts, not actions" (p. xx), which is contradicted by Sellars on page 271. Sellars's theory of perception is called a "version of direct realism" (p. xxii), but surely it is more accurate to call it a version of critical realism. The thumbnail of "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man"--Sellars's best known paper after EPM-does not distinguish properly between the Original Image and the Manirest Image and claims that Sellars thinks the scientific image falls short in not being able to "explain social activity," whereas Sellars really thinks that the scientific image lacks "the language of community and individual intentions" (p. 408). The point of the language of intentions is not to interpret or explain the world, but to change it.

The bottom line is unmistakable, however: Here are central works of the most profound and fertile American philosopher of the post-war era: everyone should have these essays.--Willem A. deVries, University of New Hampshire.