front cover of Bioluminescence
Bioluminescence
Living Lights, Lights for Living
Thérèse Wilson and J. Woodland Hastings
Harvard University Press, 2013

Bioluminescence is everywhere on earth—most of all in the ocean, from angler fish in the depths to the flashing of dinoflagellates at the surface. Here, Thérèse Wilson and Woody Hastings explore the natural history, evolution, and biochemistry of the diverse array of organisms that emit light.

While some bacteria, mushrooms, and invertebrates, as well as fish, are bioluminescent, other vertebrates and plants are not. The sporadic distribution and paucity of luminous forms calls for explanation, as does the fact that unrelated groups evolved completely different biochemical pathways to luminescence. The authors explore the hypothesis that many different luciferase systems arose in the early evolution of life because of their ability to remove oxygen, which was toxic to life when it first appeared on earth. As oxygen became abundant and bioluminescence was no longer adequate for oxygen removal, other antioxidant mechanisms evolved and most luminous species became extinct. Those light-emitting species that avoided extinction evolved uses with survival value for the light itself. Today’s luminous organisms use bioluminescence for defense from predators, for their own predatory purposes, or for communication in sexual courtship.

Bioluminescence was earlier viewed as a fascinating feature of the living world, but one whose study seemed unlikely to contribute in any practical way. Today, bioluminescence is no longer an esoteric area of research. Applications are numerous, ranging from the rapid detection of microbial contamination in beef and water, to finding the location of cancer cells, to working out circuitry in the brain.

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Causation in Psychology
John Campbell
Harvard University Press, 2020

A renowned philosopher argues that singular causation in the mind is not grounded in general patterns of causation, a claim on behalf of human distinctiveness, which has implications for the future of social robots.

A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response.

This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship? Philosopher John Campbell doesn’t think so. He argues that, while a social robot can remember the details of a person’s history better than some spouses can, it cannot empathize with the human mind, because it lacks the faculty for thinking in terms of singular causation.

Causation in Psychology makes the case that singular causation is essential and unique to the human species. From the point of view of practical action, knowledge of what generally causes what is often all one needs. But humans are capable of more. We have a capacity to imagine singular causation. Unlike robots and nonhuman animals, we don’t have to rely on axioms about pain to know how ongoing suffering is affecting someone’s ability to make decisions, for example, and this knowledge is not a derivative of general rules. The capacity to imagine singular causation, Campbell contends, is a core element of human freedom and of the ability to empathize with human thoughts and feelings.

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Evolution in a Toxic World
How Life Responds to Chemical Threats
Emily Monosson
Island Press, 2012
With BPA in baby bottles, mercury in fish, and lead in computer monitors, the world has become a toxic place. But as Emily Monosson demonstrates in her groundbreaking new book, it has always been toxic. When oxygen first developed in Earth's atmosphere, it threatened the very existence of life: now we literally can't live without it. According to Monosson, examining how life adapted to such early threats can teach us a great deal about today's (and tomorrow's) most dangerous contaminants. While the study of evolution has advanced many other sciences, from conservation biology to medicine, the field of toxicology has yet to embrace this critical approach.
In Evolution in a Toxic World, Monosson seeks to change that. She traces the development of life's defense systems—the mechanisms that transform, excrete, and stow away potentially harmful chemicals—from more than three billion years ago to today. Beginning with our earliest ancestors' response to ultraviolet radiation, Monosson explores the evolution of chemical defenses such as antioxidants, metal binding proteins, detoxification, and cell death. 
 
As we alter the world's chemistry, these defenses often become overwhelmed faster than our bodies can adapt. But studying how our complex internal defense network currently operates, and how it came to be that way, may allow us to predict how it will react to novel and existing chemicals. This understanding could lead to not only better management and preventative measures, but possibly treatment of current diseases. Development of that knowledge starts with this pioneering book.
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Imagining Otherwise
Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori
Andrew Cutrofello
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Andrew Cutrofello's book performs a psychoanalytic inversion of transcendental philosophy, taking Kant's synthetic a prior judgments and reading them in terms of a foreclosed Kantian category—that of the analytic a posteriori. Working primarily out of Freudian and Lacanian problematics, Cutrofello not only subjects Kantian thought to psychoanalytic questioning, but also develops a systematic critique of metapsychology itself, disclosing and assessing its own paralogisms, antinomies, ideal, and ethics. This is a provocative reflection on the tensions between the Enlightenment project of critique and psychoanalytic theory.
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The Institutions of Meaning
A Defense of Anthropological Holism
Vincent Descombes
Harvard University Press, 2014

Holism grows out of the philosophical position that an object or phenomenon is more than the sum of its parts. And yet analysis--a mental process crucial to human comprehension--involves breaking something down into its components, dismantling the whole in order to grasp it piecemeal and relationally. Wading through such quandaries with grace and precision, The Institutions of Meaning guides readers to a deepened appreciation of the entity that ultimately enables human understanding: the mind itself.

This major work from one of France's most innovative philosophers goes against the grain of analytic philosophy in arguing for the view known as anthropological holism. Meaning is not fundamentally a property of mental representations, Vincent Descombes says. Rather, it arises out of thought that is holistic, embedded in social existence, and bound up with the common practices that shape the way we act and talk.

To understand what an individual "believes" or "wants"--to apply psychological words to a person--we must take into account the full historical and institutional context of a person's life. But how can two people share the same thought if they do not share the same system of belief? Descombes solves this problem by developing a logic of relations that explains the ability of humans to analyze structures based on their parts. Integrating insights from anthropology, linguistics, and social theory, The Institutions of Meaning pushes philosophy forward in bold new directions.

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John Rawls
The Path to a Theory of Justice
Andrius Gališanka
Harvard University Press, 2019

An engaging account of the titan of political philosophy and the development of his most important work, A Theory of Justice, coming at a moment when its ideas are sorely needed.

It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of academe. Rawls is most famous for the development of his view of “justice as fairness,” articulated most forcefully in his best-known work, A Theory of Justice. In it he develops a liberalism focused on improving the fate of the least advantaged, and attempts to demonstrate that, despite our differences, agreement on basic political institutions is both possible and achievable.

Critics have maintained that Rawls’s view is unrealistic and ultimately undemocratic. In this incisive new intellectual biography, Andrius Gališanka argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls’s central argument, previous narratives fail to explain the novelty of his philosophical approach and so misunderstand the political vision he made prevalent. Gališanka draws on newly available archives of Rawls’s unpublished essays and personal papers to clarify the justifications Rawls offered for his assumption of basic moral agreement. Gališanka’s intellectual-historical approach reveals a philosopher struggling toward humbler claims than critics allege.

To engage with Rawls’s search for agreement is particularly valuable at this political juncture. By providing insight into the origins, aims, and arguments of A Theory of Justice, Gališanka’s John Rawls will allow us to consider the philosopher’s most important and influential work with fresh eyes.

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Liberty's Grid
A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America
Amir Alexander
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The surprising history behind a ubiquitous facet of the United States: the gridded landscape.
 
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.
 
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.
 
From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.
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The Logical Alien
Conant and His Critics
Sofia Miguens
Harvard University Press, 2019

“A remarkable book capable of reshaping what one takes philosophy to be.”
—Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia


Could there be a logical alien—a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such?

From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien, edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers—Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account.

The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.

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Nature as Event
The Lure of the Possible
Didier Debaise
Duke University Press, 2017
We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?
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Perspectives on Pragmatism
Classical, Recent, and Contemporary
Robert B. Brandom
Harvard University Press, 2011

Pragmatism has been reinvented in every generation since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. This book, by one of today’s most distinguished contemporary heirs of pragmatist philosophy, rereads cardinal figures in that tradition, distilling from their insights a way forward from where we are now.

Perspectives on Pragmatism opens with a new accounting of what is living and what is dead in the first three generations of classical American pragmatists, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Post-Deweyan pragmatism at midcentury is discussed in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, one of its most brilliant and original practitioners. Sellars’ legacy in turn is traced through the thought of his admirer, Richard Rorty, who further developed James’s and Dewey’s ideas within the professional discipline of philosophy and once more succeeded, as they had, in showing the more general importance of those ideas not only for intellectuals outside philosophy but for the wider public sphere.

The book closes with a clear description of the author’s own analytic pragmatism, which combines all these ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and synthesizes that broad pragmatism with its dominant philosophical rival, analytic philosophy, which focuses on language and logic. The result is a treatise that allows us to see American philosophy in its full scope, both its origins and its promise for tomorrow.

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The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation
Paul A. Roth
Northwestern University Press, 2020

In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

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Philosophical Topics 27.2
The Intersection of Analytic and Continental Philosophy
Hubert L. Dreyfus
University of Arkansas Press, 1999

front cover of Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century
Selected Essays
Charles Parsons
Harvard University Press, 2014

In this illuminating collection, Charles Parsons surveys the contributions of philosophers and mathematicians who shaped the philosophy of mathematics over the course of the past century.

Parsons begins with a discussion of the Kantian legacy in the work of L. E. J. Brouwer, David Hilbert, and Paul Bernays, shedding light on how Bernays revised his philosophy after his collaboration with Hilbert. He considers Hermann Weyl’s idea of a “vicious circle” in the foundations of mathematics, a radical claim that elicited many challenges. Turning to Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorem transformed debate on the foundations of mathematics and brought mathematical logic to maturity, Parsons discusses his essay on Bertrand Russell’s mathematical logic—Gödel’s first mature philosophical statement and an avowal of his Platonistic view.

Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century insightfully treats the contributions of figures the author knew personally: W. V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Hao Wang, and William Tait. Quine’s early work on ontology is explored, as is his nominalistic view of predication and his use of the genetic method of explanation in the late work The Roots of Reference. Parsons attempts to tease out Putnam’s views on existence and ontology, especially in relation to logic and mathematics. Wang’s contributions to subjects ranging from the concept of set, minds, and machines to the interpretation of Gödel are examined, as are Tait’s axiomatic conception of mathematics, his minimalist realism, and his thoughts on historical figures.

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Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics
Cora Diamond
Harvard University Press, 2019

In Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics, Cora Diamond follows two major European philosophers as they think about thinking, as well as about our ability to respond to thinking that has miscarried or gone astray. Acting as both witness to and participant in the encounter, Diamond provides fresh perspective on the importance of the work of these philosophers and the value of doing philosophy in unexpected ways.

Diamond begins with the Tractatus (1921), in which Ludwig Wittgenstein forges a link between thinking about thought and the capacity to respond to misunderstandings and confusions. She then considers G. E. M. Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959), in which Anscombe, through her engagement with Wittgenstein, further explores the limits of thinking and the ability to respond to thought that has gone wrong. Anscombe’s book is important, Diamond argues, in challenging contemporary assumptions about what philosophical problems are worth considering and about how they can be approached. Through her reading of the Tractatus, Anscombe exemplified an ethics of thinking through and against the grain of common preconceptions. The result drew attention to the questions that mattered most to Wittgenstein and conveyed with great power the nature of his achievement.

Diamond herself, in turn, challenges Anscombe on certain points, thereby further carrying out just the kind of ethical work Wittgenstein and Anscombe each felt was crucial to getting things right. Through her textured engagement with her predecessors, Diamond demonstrates what genuinely independent thought is able to achieve.

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Reflections on Frege's Philosophy
Reinhardt Grossmann
Northwestern University Press, 1969
In Reflections on Frege’s Philosophy, Reinhardt Grossmann investigates the most important themes in the philosophy of Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848-1925): his distinction between objects and functions, his characterization of numbers as nonmental classes, his theory of sense and reference, and his ontology of truth-values. Grossmann examines Frege’s solutions to basic philosophical problems, and where he finds them inadequate provides what he considers to be more viable alternatives. Grossmann argues that an ontology should contain states of affairs rather than Fregean senses, and that the sense-reference distinction, Frege’s most original and famous metaphysical innovation, must ultimately be rejected. This study is both an exposition of Frege’s philosophy and an original contribution to the philosophical enterprise.
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Self-Awareness and Alterity
A Phenomenological Investigation
Dan Zahavi
Northwestern University Press, 2020
In the rigorous and highly original Self-Awareness and Alterity, Dan Zahavi provides a sustained argument that phenomenology, especially in its Husserlian version, can make a decisive contribution to discussions of self-awareness. Engaging with debates within both analytic philosophy (Elizabeth Anscombe, John Perry, Sydney Shoemaker, Héctor-Neri Castañeda, David Rosenthal) and contemporary German philosophy (Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Ernst Tugendhat), Zahavi argues that the phenomenological tradition has much more to offer when it comes to the problem of self-awareness than is normally assumed.
 
As a contribution to the current philosophical debate concerning self-awareness, the book presents a comprehensive reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of pre-reflective self-awareness, thereby criticizing a number of prevalent interpretations. In addition, Zahavi also offers a systematic discussion of a number of phenomenological insights related to the issue of self-awareness, including analyses of the temporal, intentional, reflexive, bodily, and social nature of the self.
 
The new edition of this prize-winning book has been updated and revised, and all quotations have been translated into English. It also contains a new preface in which Zahavi traces the developments of the debates around self-awareness over the last twenty years and situates this book in the context of his subsequent work.
 
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Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity
Markus Gabriel
Harvard University Press, 2024

A leading German philosopher offers his most ambitious work yet on the nature of knowledge, arguing that being wrong about things defines the human condition.

For millennia, philosophers have dedicated themselves to advancing understanding of the nature of truth and reality. In the process they have amassed a great deal of epistemological theory—knowledge about knowledge. But negative epistemological phenomena, such as ignorance, falsity, illusion, and delusion, are persistently overlooked. This is surprising given that we all know how fallible humans are.

Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity replies with a theory of false thought, demonstrating that being wrong about things is part and parcel of subjectivity itself. For this reason, knowledge can never be secured without our making claims that can always, in principle, be wrong. Even in successful cases, where we get something right and thereby gain knowledge, the possibility of failure lingers with us. Markus Gabriel grounds this argument in a novel account of the relationship between sense, nonsense, and subjectivity—phenomena that hang together in the temporal unfolding of our cognitive lives.

While most philosophers continue to theorize subjectivity in terms of conscious self-representation and the supposedly infallible grip we have on ourselves as thinkers, Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity addresses the age-old Platonic challenge to understand situations in which we do not get reality right. Adding a stimulating perspective on epistemic failures to the work of New Realism, Gabriel addresses long-standing ontological questions in an age where the line between the real and the fake is increasingly blurred.

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Thinking Off Your Feet
How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy
Michael Strevens
Harvard University Press, 2019

Many philosophers believe they can gain knowledge about the world from the comfort of their armchairs, simply by reflecting on the nature of things. But how can the mind arrive at substantive knowledge of the world without seeking its input? Michael Strevens proposes an original defense of the armchair pursuit of philosophical knowledge, focusing on “the method of cases,” in which judgments about category membership—Does this count as causation? Does that count as the right action to take?—are used to test philosophical hypotheses about such matters as causality, moral responsibility, and beauty.

Strevens argues that the method of cases is capable of producing reliable, substantial knowledge. His strategy is to compare concepts of philosophical things to concepts of natural kinds, such as water. Philosophical concepts, like natural kind concepts, do not contain the answers to philosophers’ questions; armchair philosophy therefore cannot be conceptual analysis. But just as natural kind concepts provide a viable starting point for exploring the nature of the material world, so philosophical concepts are capable of launching and sustaining fruitful inquiry into philosophical matters, using the method of cases. Agonizing about unusual “edge cases,” Strevens shows, can play a leading role in such discoveries.

Thinking Off Your Feet seeks to reshape current debates about the nature of philosophical thinking and the methodological implications of experimental philosophy, to make significant contributions to the cognitive science of concepts, and to restore philosophy to its traditional position as an essential part of the human quest for knowledge.

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The Varieties of Experience
William James after the Linguistic Turn
Alexis Dianda
Harvard University Press, 2023

A reclamation of experience as the foremost concept in the work of William James, and a powerful argument for the continuing importance of his philosophy.

How does one deploy experience without succumbing to a foundationalist epistemology or an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness? In the wake of the so-called linguistic turn of the twentieth century, this is a question anyone thinking philosophically about experience must ask.

Alexis Dianda answers through a reading of the pragmatic tradition, culminating in a defense of the role of experience in William James’s thought. Dianda argues that by reconstructing James’s philosophical project, we can locate a model of experience that not only avoids what Wilfrid Sellars called “the myth of the given” but also enriches pragmatism broadly. First, Dianda identifies the motivations for and limitations of linguistic nominalism, insisting that critics of experience focus too narrowly on justification and epistemic practices. Then, by emphasizing how James’s concept of experience stresses the lived, affective, and nondiscursive, the argument holds that a more robust notion of experience is necessary to reflect not just how we know but how we act.

The Varieties of Experience provides a novel reconstruction of the relationship between psychology, moral thought, epistemology, and religion in James’s work, demonstrating its usefulness in tackling issues such as the relevance of perception to knowledge and the possibility of moral change. Against the tide of neopragmatic philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, who argue that a return to experience must entail appeals to foundationalism or representationalism, Dianda’s intervention rethinks not only the value and role of experience but also the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy today.

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When Words Are Called For
A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy
Avner Baz
Harvard University Press, 2012

A new form of philosophizing known as ordinary language philosophy took root in England after the Second World War, promising a fresh start and a way out of long-standing dead-end philosophical debates. Pioneered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and others, OLP is now widely rumored, within mainstream analytic philosophy, to have been seriously discredited, and consequently its perspective is ignored.

Avner Baz begs to differ. In When Words Are Called For, he shows how the prevailing arguments against OLP collapse under close scrutiny. All of them, he claims, presuppose one version or another of the very conception of word-meaning that OLP calls into question and takes to be responsible for many traditional philosophical difficulties. Worse, analytic philosophy itself has suffered as a result of its failure to take OLP’s perspective seriously. Baz blames a neglect of OLP’s insights for seemingly irresolvable disputes over the methodological relevance of “intuitions” in philosophy and for misunderstandings between contextualists and anti-contextualists (or “invariantists”) in epistemology. Baz goes on to explore the deep affinities between Kant’s work and OLP and suggests ways that OLP could be applied to other philosophically troublesome concepts.

When Words Are Called For defends OLP not as a doctrine but as a form of practice that might provide a viable alternative to work currently carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy. Accordingly, Baz does not merely argue for OLP but, all the more convincingly, practices it in this eye-opening book.

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Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology
Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions
Daniele De Santis
Ohio University Press, 2023

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

Walter Hopp
Wolfgang Huemer
Roberta Lanfredini
Danilo Manca
Karl Mertens
Antonio Nunziante
Jacob Rump
Daniele De Santis
Michela Summa
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