Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn

"I know that a review without any critical comments looks like an apology rather than a real review ... and to my embarrassment, there is little I can say by way of criticism about James O'Shea's book. The depth and colorfulness of the depiction of Sellars' philosophy as presented by O'Shea [is] remarkable."
Erkenntnis

"Not only does this book present a comprehensive picture of Sellars?s philosophical system in its breadth, its depth and subtlety, it does so with a freshness and lucidity that I have not seen before in commentaries on Sellars, including my own."
Tom Vinci, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"A pellucid introduction to the systematic thought of one of the deepest, most important, and least understood of twentieth-century philosophers."
Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburgh

"Jim O'Shea's compact book is an extremely valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, presenting the essential elements of his dialectically intricate work in a relatively brief and eminently readable form. The book offers clear and accessible accounts of many of Sellars' most challenging ideas, embedded in a lucid expository structure that captures and effectively conveys the deeply systematic character of his philosophical vision. O'Shea insightfully traces the implications of Sellars' "naturalism with a normative turn" for the innovative conceptions of meaning, knowledge, representation, and truth in terms of which he undertook to reconcile our "manifest image" of ourselves as unitary subjects of sensation, thought, and action with the continually-developing "scientific image" of a world composed only of imperceptible impersonal entities and forces."
Jay F. Rosenberg, University of North Carolina