• Lake Sumter State College, Florida
    Philosophy Department, Lake Sumter State College, Florida
    Instructor
University of South Florida
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2012
Orlando, FL, United States of America
  •  29
    American Philosophy: The Basics By Nancy Stanlick
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (4): 578. 2013.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:American Philosophy: The Basics by Nancy StanlickPeter [email protected] Stanlick. American Philosophy: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2013. 174 pp with index.In 174 pages American Philosophy: The Basics covers the American philosophical tradition from its European roots to some of its contemporary leanings. The stated goal of the book is to give an overview of American philosophy and “explain what makes Americ…Read more
  •  9
    While Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy is often depicted in an ahistorical fashion, this book explores the consequences of placing his work in its historical context. In order to show how Sellars’ early publications depend on contextual factors, Peter Olen reconstructs the conceptions of language, psychological, and social explanation that dominated American philosophy in the early 20th century. Because of Sellars’ differing explanations of language and behaviour, Olen argues that many of Sellars’ ea…Read more
  •  70
    Durkheim, Sellars, and the Origins of Collective Intentionality
    with Stephen Turner
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (5): 954-975. 2015.
    Wilfrid Sellars read and annotated Celestine Bouglé’s Evolution of Values, translated by his mother with an introduction by his father. The book expounded Émile Durkheim's account of morality and elaborated his account of origins of value in collective social life. Sellars replaced elements of this account in constructing his own conception of the relationship between the normative and community, but preserved a central one: the idea that conflicting collective and individual intentions could be…Read more
  •  54
    Was Sellars an error theorist?
    Synthese 193 (7): 2053-2075. 2016.
    Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational membe…Read more
  •  114
    Response to Critics
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (3). 2019.
    All contributions included in the present issue were originally prepared for an “Author Meets Critics” session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.
  •  3
    Comments on American Philosophy: The Basics
    Florida Philosophical Review 14 (1): 56-63. 2014.
    I provide some brief critiques concerning Nancy Stanlick’s recent work, American Philosophy: The Basics. While it should be considered an exceptional and inclusive study of American philosophy, I argue that Stanlick’s work suffers from too strong of an emphasis on the idea that American philosophy, and thus American philosophers, are wholly characterized by an emphasis on the practical.
  •  8
    This collection is an attempt by a diverse range of authors to reignite interest in C.I. Lewis’s work within the pragmatist and analytic traditions. Although pragmatism has enjoyed a renewed popularity in the past thirty years, some influential pragmatists have been overlooked. C. I. Lewis is arguably the most important of overlooked pragmatists and was highly influential within his own time period. The volume assembles a wide range of perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of Lewis’s cont…Read more
  •  10
    Although Wilfrid Sellars's work holds a prominent place in recent analytic philosophy, little work has been done to situate his early approaches to normativity and the philosophy of language in their proper context. What little work has been done tends to emphasize Sellars's connection to a then dominant logical empiricism at the expense of marginalizing other American philosophical schools. On top of this historical issue, most scholars attempting to explain Sellars's systematic philosophy tend…Read more
  •  76
    I explore a strand of reception history that follows Rudolf Carnap’s shift from a purely syntactical analysis of constructed languages to his conception of pure semantics. My exploration focuses on Gustav Bergmann’s and Everett Hall’s interpretation of pure semantics, their understanding of what constitutes a ’formal’ investigation of language, and their arguments concerning the relationship between expressions and their extra-linguistic referents. I argue that Bergmann and Hall strongly misread…Read more
  •  2
    Now, Is That Really Blasphemy? Heretical Meaning And Belief
    Florida Philosophical Review 8 (1): 31-40. 2008.
    Religious tensions in America, as well as abroad, are nothing new. Yet, in this current epoch various cultures around the world are involved in internal clashes between religious and secular groups that pull at the attention of the public more often than not. Though a myriad of issues confront anyone interested in investigating these tensions, one must first wonder what, exactly, blasphemy means to both sides of the debate. In the course of doing so, one interesting question arises: What does it…Read more
  •  6
    William J. Gavin , William James in Focus . Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 34 (3-4): 158-160. 2014.
  •  32
    Consequences of Behaviorism: Sellars and de Laguna on Explanation
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (2): 111-131. 2017.
    I explore conceptual tensions that emerge between Wilfrid Sellars’ and Grace de Laguna’s adoption of behaviorism. Despite agreeing on various points, I argue that Sellars’ and de Laguna’s positions represent a split between normativist and descriptivist approaches to explanation that are generally incompatible, and I explore how both positions claim conceptual priority.
  •  11
    Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications (review)
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (2): 296-299. 2017.
  •  25
    Erratum to: Synthese DOI 10.1007/s11229-015-0678-4The last two block quotes of this article should be cited as “Sellars 1947c”, not “Sellars 1947”. “Sellars 1947c” references the bibliography entry for a piece of correspondence housed in the special collections archive at the University of Iowa. It is not, as the bibliography lists, a published work
  •  873
    The Realist Challenge to Conceptual Pragmatism
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2): 152-167. 2015.
    Although commonly cited as one of the philosophers responsible for the resurgence of interest in pragmatism, Wilfrid Sellars was also the son of Roy Wood Sellars, one of the most dedicated critical realists of the early 20th century. Given his father’s realism and his own ‘scientific realism,’ one might assume that the history of realism – and, despite contemporary interest, not pragmatism – would best serve as the historical background for Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy. I argue that Wilfrid Sella…Read more
  •  52
    From Formalism to Psychology: Metaphilosophical Shifts in Wilfrid Sellars’s Early Works
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 6 (1): 24-63. 2016.
    When discussing Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy, very little work has been done to offer a developmental account of his systematic views. More often than not, Sellars’s complex views are presented in a systematic and holistic fashion that ignores any periodization of his work. I argue that there is a metaphilosophical shift in Sellars’s early philosophy that results in substantive changes to his conception of language, linguistic rules, and normativity. Specifically, I claim that Sellars’s shift fr…Read more
  •  20
    Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2): 303-307. 2012.
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Page 303-307, May 2012