The Metaphysics of Practice Writings on Action, Community, and Obligation

The Metaphysics of Practice brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced Sellars's contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture.

Wilfrid Sellars

Kyle Ferguson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on Wilfrid Sellars's metaethical legacy. Ferguson has written or co-written a dozen articles and book chapters, mostly addressing ethical challenges related to vaccines, global health, the health impacts of climate change, and climate adaptation. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Bioethics, Science and Engineering Ethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, Bioethics, and in other journals and edited volumes.


Jeremy Koons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Qatar. Koons is the author of The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars (Routledge, 2019), the first in-depth work on this subject, and the co-editor (with Ronald Loeffler) of Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars's Practical Philosophy (Routledge, 2022). He has also written or co-written two additional books as well as two dozen articles and book chapters on metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His work has appeared in Philosophical Studies, The Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, and numerous other journals and edited volumes.

Editorial Notes
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Sources
Editors' Introduction
Part 1: The Moral Point of View
1. Mind, Meaning, and Behavior
2. Obligation and Motivation
3. "Ought" and Moral Principles
4. Science and Ethics
5. Reason and the Art of Living in Plato
6. Objectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the Moral Point of View
Part 2 Agency and Moral Psychology: Intentions and Volitions
7. Thought and Action
8. Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person
9. Actions and Events
10. Volitions Reaffirmed
Part 3 Free Will and Akrasia
11. Fatalism and Determinism
12. Reply to Alan Donagan
13. On Knowing the Better and Doing the Worse
Part 4 Deontic Logic, Practical Reason, and the Logic of Intentions
14. Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of "Ought"
15. Reflections on Contrary-to-Duty Imperatives
16. On Reasoning about Values
17. Conditional Promises and Conditional Intentions
Part 5 Manuscripts and Correspondence
18. Practical Reasoning
19. Practical Reasoning Again
20. Hare-Sellars Correspondence
21. Binkley-Sellars Correspondence
22. Castañeda-Sellars Correspondence
23. Aune-Sellars Correspondence
24. Sellars to Solomon, 1976
Index