Customer Reviews

Knowledge, Mind, and the Given : Reading Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Including the Complete Text of Sellars's Essay

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This is a good book which would serve well as an introduction to Sellars's dense "EPM." It provides background information on sense-datum theories, a contextual overview, clarification (i.e., shows the arguments) in each section of the text, and offers insightful commentary on each section. "EPM" is included at the end of the text.

I highly recommend this book, along with Sellars's other work, and McDowell's Mind and World.

If you have struggled, like many of us have, to understand Sellars' essay, this is the book for you.

I worked through Sellars' essay using this book as a companion volume, and it was incredibly helpful.

Why does this single essay deserve a guide? First, because of its importance. In this essay you will find precursors to many modern strands of thought, such as the 'language of thought' hypothesis, coherence theories of justification, and even pragmatic theories of meaning.

Unfortunately, the essay is also very difficult to understand. Sellars assumed working familiarity with the main currents in philosophy as understood by a philosopher in the 1950s. He also assumes familiarity with historical figures such as Kant. Finally, even if you have said familiarity, the essay is dense and sometimes uses rather tortured prose that can be very difficult to understand.

So, if you find yourself stumbling to understand 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', buy this book immediately. You will be very glad you did. It is extremely clearly written, and it removes the requirement that you have a degree in philosophy to understand Sellars' seminal essay.

the commentary writers are offering here is crowded with the details of Sellar's essay and quite at no point supplies a general foothold to make Sellar's work and what's original in it understandable (which I finally can not appreciate how philosophically original it is).