ABSTRACT
On the assumption that most philosophers interested in ethics are not conversant with Sellars’s larger philosophical project, this chapter gives a very brief overview of some of his chief aims and methods. Sellars’s chief philosophical goal is to reconcile the framework of normativity (and of persons more generally) with a hard-nosed scientific realism. His method for doing this is to understand distinctly philosophical expressions—moral, epistemic, intentional, modal, semantic, and so on—not as attempting to describe the world, but rather as nondescriptive expressions in the metalanguage. This chapter gives an overview of Sellars’s nominalism and how he attempts to make good on the claim that “once the tautology ‘The world is described by descriptive concepts’ is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to second-class citizenship in discourse, are not inferior, just different” (“Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities,” §79/p. 282).
