Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology
Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions

“This is the first book to bring Sellars and Husserlian phenomenology into dialogue, exploring the many lines of intersection between them, in an impressively wide range of issues. By highlighting the complexity and richness of the relations between Sellars’s thought and phenomenology, the book persuasively shows how an encounter between them can be beneficial to both parties and a source of novel philosophical insight.”

Dionysis Christias, University of Athens

“Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology … explores what Sellars does with phenomenology and how better attention to phenomenology throws much light on Sellars. In the twenty-first century the gap between analytic and Continental philosophy has been slowly closing. This volume makes a much-needed contribution to that project.”

Carl Sachs, Marymount University

“Finally, the relationship between Sellars and phenomenology receives the treatment it deserves. This thoughtful collection of papers explores unprecedented territories as it locates in Sellars’ own work traces of his complex and longstanding relation with phenomenology. The book is indispensable for anyone interested in the connection between phenomenology and analytic philosophy of Kantian and Neo-Kantian inspiration.”

Maxime Doyon, Université de Montréal

Wilfrid Sellars tackled the difficult problems of reconciling Pittsburgh school–style analytic thought, Husserlian phenomenology, and the Myth of the Given.

This collection of essays brings into dialogue the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars—founder of the Pittsburgh school of thought—and phenomenology, with a special focus on the work of Edmund Husserl. The book’s wide-ranging discussions include the famous Myth of the Given but also more traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology such as the

• status of perception and imagination
• nature of intentionality
• concept of motivation
• relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences
• relationship between conceptual and preconceptual experiences

Moreover, the volume addresses the conflicts between Sellars’s manifest and scientific images of the world and Husserl’s ontology of the life-world. The volume takes as a point of departure Sellars’s criticism of the Myth of the Given, but only to show the many problems that label obscures. Contributors explain aspects of Sellars’s philosophy vis-à-vis Husserl’s phenomenology, articulating the central problems and solutions of each. The book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in learning more about Sellars and for those comparing Continental and analytic philosophical thought.

Contributors

Daniele De Santis is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, Prague. He is coeditor in chief of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy; he has recently published the book Husserl and the A Priori: Phenomenology and Rationality and coedited the Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.   More info →

Danilo Manca is a junior assistant professor at the University of Pisa. He is the author of a book in Italian on Hegel and Husserl; he has coedited the volume Hegel and Phenomenology, and special journal issues including “Realism, Pragmatism, Naturalism: The Vicissitudes of Phenomenology in North America” in Discipline Filosofiche, “The Conceptual Framework of Persons: A Metaphilosophical Investigation” in Philosophical Inquiries, and “Pragmatism and Phenomenology” in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.   More info →