From Empiricism to Expressivism-轻识

The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading twentieth-century critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Sellars stood in the forefront of a recoil within analytic philosophy from the foundationalist assumptions of contemporary empiricists. From Empiricism to Expressivism is a far-reach...

Unifying and extending Sellars’s most important ideas, Robert Brandom constructs a theory of pragmatic expressivism which, in contrast to empiricism, understands meaning and knowledge in terms of the role expressions play in social practices. The key lies in Sellars’s radical reworking of Kant’s idea of the categories: the idea that the expressive job characteristic of many of the most important philosophical concepts is not to describe or explain the empirical world but rather to make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes description and explanation possible.

Brandom reconciles otherwise disparate elements of Sellars’s system, revealing a greater level of coherence and consistency in the philosopher’s arguments against empiricism than has usually been acknowledged. From Empiricism to Expressivism clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase, and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

“From Empiricism to Expressivism offers an original, critical reading of Sellars and a constructive extension of some of Sellars’s most important ideas. As a contribution to the literature on Sellars, Robert Brandom’s book has no competitor; there are excellent general introductions to Sellars’s philosophical thought, but Brandom’s work is on a different level. It is philosophically adventurous, a superb piece of deep exegesis, and a first rate work of philosophy.”—Michael Williams, Johns Hopkins University

“From Empiricism to Expressivism is a coherently developed and highly original interpretation of Sellars’s philosophy, read in a way that simultaneously defends Brandom’s own very widely discussed analytic pragmatism. One of the most important achievements of the book is to unify and extend crucial ‘metalinguistic’ aspects of Sellars’s work that were central to some of Sellars’s most influential views about meaning, normativity, and modality, but key aspects of which received only scattered and uneven treatment in Sellars’s own writings. This book represents the most sophisticated and penetrating interpretation of Sellars’s philosophy available, past and present.”—James O’Shea, University College Dublin

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.