ABSTRACT
In many respects, Wilfrid Sellars was among the philosophers to inaugurate a dialogue between analytically inspired thinking and the history of philosophy. Sellars is not only an interesting philosopher in his own right, but also worth studying for his way of approaching the history of philosophy. Before addressing Sellars's approach, it is helpful to contextualize the various existing ways of understanding the history of philosophy. Generally speaking, the current debate on the history of philosophy—especially in the contemporary Anglophone context—can be usefully divided into two approaches, which have been called 'assimilationist' and 'contextualists.' Sellars's most famous quote declares the history of philosophy as the "lingua franca of thought" that makes communication between philosophers possible: "A dialectical use of historical positions is the most reliable way of anchoring arguments and making them intersubjectively available". The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
