In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers--The Pittsburgh School--whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to identify something as a manifestation of conceptual capacities is to place it in a space of norms. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that humans are distinctive because they occupy a norm-governed "space of reasons." Along with Sellars, Robert Brandom and John McDowell have tried to work out the implications of that idea for understanding knowledge, thought, norms, language, and intentional action. The aim of this book is to introduce their shared views on those topics, while also charting a few key disputes between them.

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality proposes a revisionary history of the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead and analytic philosophy, as well as a constructive proposal for how thinking with Whitehead can help disabuse analytic philosophy of the problem of intentionality. Lisa Landoe Hedrick defines “analytic” philosophy as primarily the intellectual tradition that runs from Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell to Wilfrid Sellars, or, geographically speaking, from Vienna to Cambridge to Pittsburgh between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As key members of the Pittsburgh School of philosophy, Robert Brandom and John McDowell pick up the Sellarsian project of reconciling nature and normativity in different ways, yet each of them presupposes a problematic relationship between language and the world precisely bequeathed to them by an implicit metaphysics of subjecthood that characterized analytic thinkers of the early twentieth century. Hedrick both investigates Whitehead’s published and archived critiques of early analytic thought—as an extension of a wider critique of modern philosophy—and employs Whitehead to reimagine nature and normativity after the problem of intentionality by way of his aesthetics of symbolism. This book thereby builds upon a burgeoning effort among philosophers to interface process and analytic thought, but it is the first to focus on contemporary analytic thinkers.

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Perfected science is but an idealization that provides a useful contrast to highlight the limited character of what we do and can attain. This lies at the core of various debates in the philosophy of science and Rescher's discussion focuses on the question: how far could science go in principle—what are the theoretical limits on science? He concentrates on what science can discover, not what it should discover. He explores in detail the existence of limits or limitations on scientific inquiry, especially those that, in principle, preclude the full realization of the aims of science, as opposed to those that relate to economic obstacles to scientific progress. Rescher also places his argument within the politics of the day, where "strident calls of ideological extremes surround us," ranging from the exaggeration that "science can do anything"—to the antiscientism that views science as a costly diversion we would be well advised to abandon. Rescher offers a middle path between these two extremes and provides an appreciation of the actual powers and limitations of science, not only to philosophers of science but also to a larger, less specialized audience.

Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.

The Engaged Intellect collects important essays of John McDowell. Each involves a sustained engagement with the views of an important philosopher and is characterized by a modesty that is partly temperamental and partly methodological. It is typical of McDowell to represent his own best insights either as already to be found in the writings of his heroes (Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Sellars) or as inevitably emerging from a charitable modification of the views of those (such as Anscombe, Sellars, Davidson, Evans, Rorty, Dreyfus, and Brandom) subjected here to criticism. McDowell therefore develops his own philosophical picture in these pages through a method of indirection. The method is one of intervening in a philosophical dialectic at a characteristic junctureÑin which it is difficult to avoid the feeling that further progress is required. McDowell shows how progress is to be achieved by preserving what is most attractive in the views of those he is in conversation with, while whittling away their weaknesses. As he practices this method, what emerges through the volume is the unity of McDowellÕs own views. The combination of philosophical breadth with dialectical depthÑof intricate argumentative detail with overall philosophical coherenceÑmarks McDowell as one of the most compelling philosophers of our time.

In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers—The Pittsburgh School—whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to identify something as a manifestation of conceptual capacities is to place it in a space of norms. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that humans are distinctive because they occupy a norm-governed "space of reasons." Along with Sellars, Robert Brandom and John McDowell have tried to work out the implications of that idea for understanding knowledge, thought, norms, language, and intentional action. The aim of this book is to introduce their shared views on those topics, while also charting a few key disputes between them.