ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a dialectical examination of Sellars’ naturalism. There is no question that Sellars was a naturalist, but there are strong tensions within his naturalism. Famously, Sellars introduced a distinction between the ‘Manifest Image’ – the common sense conceptual framework that includes both enduring physical objects in space and time and persons, self-conscious and rule-recognizing beings – and the ‘Scientific Image,’ the still-nascent framework being developed by the sciences purporting to describe and explain the world in its entirety. On the one hand, Sellars is a scientific realist: It is science that tells us what really exists. On the other hand, Sellars is also committed the indispensability of norms and values, grounded in individual and community intentions. Sellars’ philosophy is a complex and sophisticated attempt to find room within scientific realism for the norms and values that make life meaningful.
