Wilfrid Sellars

American philosopher who made seminal contributions to the critique of the given, the nature of semantic concepts, and the relationship between the scientific and manifest images of the world — widely regarded as one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century.

The Myth of the Given: there is no epistemically privileged class of immediately justified beliefs — even perceptual beliefs require conceptual mediation. The space of reasons: normative relations between concepts cannot be reduced to causal relations — the logical space of reasons is autonomous. Manifest/scientific image: the scientific image of colorless physical particles is not more real than the manifest image of colored objects — the task of philosophy is to reconcile them.