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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...