O'Shea, James R.: Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn.

deVries, Willem A.

O'SHEA, James R. Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn. Key Contemporary Thinkers series. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. xii + 256 pp. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $24.95--Books about Wilfrid Sellars's complex and systematic philosophy are beginning to multiply, as befits a thinker of his stature. James O'Shea's Wilfrid Sellars is a very welcome addition to the field. O'Shea explicitly states that the target audience for his book is "upper level undergraduate students" and that readability was a major priority for him. He succeeds admirably in writing a book that will be intelligible and helpful to (relative) beginners in philosophy while still containing much of value to seasoned practitioners in the field. O'Shea consciously stresses the architectonic principles that inform Sellars's philosophy. O'Shea repeatedly brings to the fore Sellars's distinction between the Manifest and the Scientific Images of man-in-the-world and how their dynamic relation organizes Sellars's treatment of issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Again, O'Shea returns several times to Sellars's conception of humans as sensing, thinking, and willing beings, and the organization induced in his philosophy by that trio of human capacities. Finally, O'Shea stresses how Sellars's "norm/nature meta-principle" (that "Espousal of principles is reflected in uniformities of performance") supplies an underlying structural theme in Sellars's attempt to place man in nature.

O'Shea begins with the clash between the Manifest and Scientific Images, which informs Sellars's conception of the task facing philosophy today. This leads him to probe Sellars's philosophy of science, especially his scientific realism. Then O'Shea identifies the concepts of thought and intentionality as the linchpin notions in the Manifest Image: "So, given the scientific realist image of the human being as 'a complex physical system' ..., how ... do we find a place in nature for ... conceptual thought?" (p. 48). Many philosophers have attempted to understand intentionality as a relation to objects, perhaps concrete, perhaps abstract. Sellars uses language as a model in his theory of thinking and resolutely denies that either linguistic meaning or the intentionality of thought is relational in form. O'Shea formulates Sellars's functional role theory of meaning and intentionality clearly, including a discussion of the nominalism that complements Sellars's naturalism. O'Shea then moves on to a discussion of the epistemology and metaphysics of mind that Sellars develops on the basis of his theory of intentionality. Reversing the order of exposition in Sellars's classic "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," O'Shea discusses first Sellars's seminal idea that our conception of and access to the mental is like that afforded by a theory that utilizes a publicly accessible phenomenon (in this case, language use) as the model for an explanation of some unobservable domain. Then O'Shea considers in some detail the epistemology that arises out of Sellars's arguments, especially his critique of the myth of the given. These epistemological issues lead him to consider the role of sense impressions in our cognitive encounter with the world--an area in which Sellarsian thought is at its most complex and subtle. O'Shea meets these issues head-on with one of the clearer discussions of Sellars on truth and picturing that I have seen. The book rounds off with a return to the clash between the Manifest and Scientific Images and Sellars's attempt to formulate a synoptic vision, which O'Shea calls Sellars's "Naturalism with a Normative Turn." The central elements of that view are: (1) the idea that nature is ultimately one interconnected, law-governed, causal network in which humans are complex systems of ontologically more basic entities, (2) though humans and their behaviors are "causally reducible" to complexes of whatever ultimate elements science tells us compose the world, nonetheless, (3) there is no possible logical or conceptual reduction of the norm-rich framework of persons as rule-governed strivers capable of right and wrong in perception, thought, and action. Humans are complex patterns of the ultimate physical entities that nonetheless have a right to use normative concepts.

It is interesting to compare O'Shea's Wilfrid Sellars with the like-titled Wilfrid Sellars recently published by Acumen/McGill-Queens University Press (open admission: the one I wrote). DeVries's book is longer and more detailed, but can be difficult and technical at times; O'Shea is more economical with his prose and will be easier to digest for most readers. There seems to be no fundamental disagreement between the two books and little significant disagreement even about the details, though the two do seem to envision the final synoptic unification of the Manifest and Scientific Images differently. Students trying to crack Sellars will probably want to start with the O'Shea, then move to deVries, and, if their eyeballs haven't dried up, then go on to Jay Rosenberg's new Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images.

Until now, Sellars devotees have been relatively few in number because of the intense effort it takes to see the unity and the articulation of Sellars's diverse and diffuse corpus. Books like O'Shea's provide an overview and a point of entry into Sellarsian thought that will, hopefully, make this seminal and original thinker a familiar dialectical interlocutor in the ongoing conversation that is philosophy.--Willem A. deVries, University of New Hampshire.