Although his philosopher father distanced himself from Pragmatism, Wilfrid Sellars learned
much from his pragmatist forebears and shared significant ground with them. This essay
discusses three areas of their common ground: their views on meaning and its ties to practice, the criticism of givenness, and the sociality of reason.

Why interest in Hegel is reviving, under the prodding of people like Robert Brandom.

Hegel often uses spatial metaphors to characterize what he calls “mechanical
memory”. He describes it as an “abstract space” populated by “meaningless
words” that co-exist in juxtaposition to each other therein. Space is the realm
of the self-external, so it seems surprising that Hegel would employ such a notion
at a relatively late stage in the dialectical investigation of intelligence, the realm of
the internal. After establishing the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Hegel’s texts
dealing with mechanical memory, this essay puts forth an interpretation of Hegel’s
spatial characterization of mechanical memory that draws on the notion of a “logical
space of reasons” to be found in the work of Wilfrid Sellars and the so-called
“Pittsburgh Hegelians”.

A precis of Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"

I take it to be clear that pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism underwent an evolution that so transformed it, not long before pragmatism emerged, that it might seem a small step between them. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought.

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian.  Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself.  They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things–the belief that things do “hang together.”  Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but so are the resonances.

Analytic philosophy is rediscovering Hegel.  This essay examines a particularly strong thread of new analytic Hegelianism, sometimes called ‘Pittsburgh Hegelianism’, which began with the work of Wilfrid Sellars.  In trying to bring Anglo-American philosophy from its empiricist phase into a more sophisticated, corrected Kantianism, Sellars moved in substantially Hegelian directions.  Sellars’ work has been extended, and revised by his Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell and Robert B. Brandom.  The sociality and historicity of reason, the proper treatment of space and time, conceptual holism, inferentialism, the reality of conceptual structure, the structure of experience, and the nature of normativity are the central concerns of Pittsburgh Hegelianism.