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

Online ISBN:
9780191957758
Print ISBN:
9780192866820
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

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

Kyle Ferguson (ed.),
Kyle Ferguson
(ed.)
Hunter College, City University of New York
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Jeremy Randel Koons (ed.)
Jeremy Randel Koons
(ed.)

Professor

Georgetown University in Qatar
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Published online:
24 August 2023
Published in print:
7 September 2023
Online ISBN:
9780191957758
Print ISBN:
9780192866820
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) saw the development of his practical philosophy as central to his entire philosophical enterprise—the linchpin to situating the framework of persons within a scientific worldview. The core idea in Sellars’s moral writings is that the moral “ought” is to be understood as a special kind of intention. Specifically, moral judgments are we-intentions, practical commitments one makes “as one of us” or from the communal point of view. In developing this theory, Sellars articulated sophisticated and powerful answers to questions of moral motivation, the intersubjectivity of moral judgments, the nature of moral community, the relation between the normative and the natural, and much more. The Metaphysics of Practice gathers together for the first time Sellars’s published writings in moral philosophy, along with previously unpublished manuscripts and significant correspondence between Sellars and such interlocutors as R. M. Hare, Bruce Aune, and Hector-Neri Castañeda. Additionally, there is a substantive editors’ introduction which lays out the essentials of Sellars’s theory and summarizes the basic arguments of each chapter of the volume. This volume will be of great value not only to Sellars scholars but also to philosophers working in metaethics (particularly ethical expressivism), philosophy of action, and collective intentionality.

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