Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism,[10] who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".[11]
Wilfrid Sellars
July 2, 1989 (aged 77)
University of Michigan (B.A., 1933)
University at Buffalo (M.A., 1934)[4]
Oriel College, Oxford (B.A., 1936; MA, 1940)
Critical realism (philosophy of perception)
Criticism of foundationalist epistemology (the "Myth of the Given")
Psychological nominalism
Kantian empiricism[4]
The distinction between the 'manifest' and the 'scientific' image
Logical space of reasons (the realm of the semantic)[4]
Sellarsian dilemma for foundationalism[5]
Synoptic vision[6][7]
Rylean myth[8]
Life and career[edit]
His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century.[12] Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan (BA, 1933), the University at Buffalo, and Oriel College, Oxford (1934–1937), where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During World War II, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa (1938–1946), the University of Minnesota (1947–1958), Yale University (1958–1963), and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.[13] He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977. He was a founder of the journal Philosophical Studies.
Sellars is well known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology—the "Myth of the Given" as he called it.[8] However, his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. Sellars was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.
Politics[edit]
The son of a socialist,[21] Sellars was involved in left-wing politics. As a student at the University of Michigan, Wilfrid Sellars was one of the founding members of the first North-American cooperative house for university students, which was then called "Michigan Socialist House" (and which was later renamed "Michigan Cooperative House").[22] He also campaigned for the socialist candidate Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America.[23]
Legacy[edit]
Robert Brandom, his junior colleague at Pittsburgh, named Sellars and Willard Van Orman Quine as the two most profound and important philosophers of their generation. Sellars's goal of a synoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the Pittsburgh School, whose members include Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland.[24] Especially Brandom introduced a Hegelian variety of the Pittsburgh School, often called analytic Hegelianism.[25][26]
Other philosophers strongly influenced by Sellars span the full spectrum of contemporary English-speaking philosophy, from neopragmatism (Richard Rorty) to eliminative materialism (Paul Churchland) to rationalism (Laurence BonJour). Sellars's philosophical heirs also include Ruth Millikan, Daniel Dennett, Héctor-Neri Castañeda, Bruce Aune, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Matthew Burstein, Ray Brassier, Andrew Chrucky, Jeffrey Sicha, Pedro Amaral, Thomas Vinci, Willem A. de Vries, David Rosenthal, Ken Wilber and Michael Williams. Sellars's work has been drawn upon in feminist standpoint theory, for example in the work of Quill Kukla.[27]
Sellars's death in 1989 was the result of long-term alcohol use.[28] A collection of essays devoted to 'Sellars and his Legacy' was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 (James O'Shea, ed., Wilfrid Sellars and his Legacy), with contributions from Brandom, deVries, Kraut, Kukla, Lance, McDowell, Millikan, O'Shea, Rosenthal, Seibt, and Williams.