Tim Crane writes:

Other things contribute to Sellars’s relative invisibility in the broader intellectual landscape. He was an academic philosopher through and through: his father was a philosopher, and he spent almost his entire life in universities. He founded a journal (Philosophical Studies, still one of the field’s leading journals), he edited textbooks (Donald Davidson once said that he ‘got through graduate school’ by reading Feigl and Sellars’s Readings in Philosophical Analysis), he was by all accounts a charismatic and devoted teacher, and he clearly believed in academic philosophy as a discipline – a systematic, and not just a critical, enterprise. One of his more readable essays, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (collected in this volume), begins with a definition of the aim of philosophy which is as good as any attempt to answer the impossible question of what it really is: ‘The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’

(LRB 19 June 2008)

Harvard University Press | Hardback 450 pp. |ISBN: 9780674024984