From Empiricism to Expressivism

“One of the leading U.S. philosophers, Brandom develops his systematic views about language, knowledge, and the mind through a fascinating conversation with the work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), who influenced English-language philosophy as much as any 20th-century thinker. In Brandom’s hands, the criticisms of empiricism Sellars developed are transformed into a set of powerfully coherent views… Brandom’s scrupulous, illuminating discussion of Sellars’s search for a pragmatic and naturalistic alternative to empiricism should forever establish Sellars’s lasting importance to analytic philosophy. This inspired interpretation of Sellars gradually transitions, chapter by chapter, into Brandom’s thorough development of his own theory of pragmatic expressivism. As a masterwork of late analytic philosophy, this book must be studied as closely as Sellars by those interested in philosophy and linguistics.”—J. R. Shook, Choice

“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