Wilfrid Sellars

Sellars used the phrase in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, published in 1956, to attack the idea that raw sense data can justify knowledge all by itself. His point was that knowledge depends on concepts, language, and norms, not just passive receiving of impressions.

It is a core text in 20th-century analytic philosophy because it reshaped debates about perception, justification, and mental content. Later philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell all respond to Sellars in different ways.

He is not simply anti-empiricist; he rejects a foundationalist version of empiricism based on immediate givens. Sellars still takes science seriously, which is why his famous image contrast between the manifest image and the scientific image matters.

The manifest image is the everyday framework in which we understand persons, intentions, colors, reasons, and ordinary objects. Sellars contrasts it with the scientific image, which describes the world through theoretical entities such as atoms, fields, and neurophysiology.