ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the largely unknown line of reception that connects Wilfrid Sellars’s thought to the philosophical traditions of Oxford Realism and Ordinary Language Philosophy. Its question is whether the distinctive understanding of philosophy and philosophical methodology that is the hallmark of Statement and Inference, the chief work of Oxford philosopher John Cook Wilson (1849–1915), is likely to have influenced Sellars’s own philosophical writing. My argument proceeds in three steps: I begin by reviewing what we know about how Sellars came into contact with Oxford philosophy and, in particular, with Statement and Inference. After that, I take a close look at Cook Wilson’s metaphilosophical and methodological commitments as expressed in this book, focusing on his idea that philosophy involves the explication of concepts that are embedded in our everyday ways of thinking and speaking about the world we live in. Finally, I address the question whether there is a sense in which Sellars’s groundbreaking work in metaphilosophy and the philosophy of language follows up on this idea. To this end, I reconstruct his reflections on “explication” and “clarification” in his first essays in a way that brings them into contact with larger concerns of his philosophical project.
