Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars

This course will be structured around a close reading of Sellars's seminal "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." Each week we will read between one and three major sections of that work (out of sixteen sections in all), along with relevant background material illustrating the kinds of positions that Sellars was reacting to and drawing from (including such authors as Russell, Ayer, CI Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, and Ryle), other selections from Sellars's works (including the essays in the anthology In the Space of Reasons, Science and Metaphysics, and "The Structure of Knowledge"), and relevant recent secondary literature on Sellars's thought (from authors such as Brandom, McDowell, Rosenberg, DeVries, O'Shea, Michael Williams, Lance, Kukla etc.). (III)