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.

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
7 - Thought and Action
8 - Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person
9 - Actions and Events
10 - Volitions Reaffirmed
11 - Fatalism and Determinism
12 - Reply to Alan Donagan
13 - On Knowing the Better and Doing the Worse
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
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

Kyle Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Augustana College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, where he wrote his dissertation on Wilfrid Sellars's metaethical legacy. Ferguson completed an ethics fellowship in the Bioethics Program at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has written or co-written a dozen articles and book chapters on metaethics, bioethics, and environmental ethics. Jeremy Koons is 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, 2023). 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.