20 Facts About Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".

Wilfrid Sellars's work has had a profound impact in virtually all areas of analytic philosophy beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, including in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of science.

Wilfrid Sellars's father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century.

Wilfrid Sellars then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Wilfrid Sellars served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977.

Wilfrid Sellars was a founder of the journal Philosophical Studies.

Wilfrid Sellars is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision.

Wilfrid 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.

Wilfrid Sellars's work reflects a sustained engagement with German idealism, most notably in his 1966 John Locke Lectures that were then published two years later as Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes.

Wilfrid Sellars coined certain now-common idioms in philosophy, such as the "space of reasons".

Note: corresponds in part to the distinction Wilfrid Sellars makes between the manifest image and the scientific image.

Wilfrid Sellars named this "The Myth of the Given," attributing it to sense-data theories of knowledge.

Wilfrid Sellars used a fictional tribe, the "Ryleans," since he wanted to address Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind.

Wilfrid Sellars saw it as something that can be useful or otherwise, rather than true or false.

Wilfrid Sellars aimed to unite the conceptual behavior of the "space of reasons" with the concept of a subjective sense experience.

In "Meaning as Functional Classification" Wilfrid Sellars elaborated upon a version of functional role semantics that he had previously defended in prior publications.

For Wilfrid Sellars, thoughts are analogous to linguistic utterances, and both thoughts and linguistic utterances gain their content through token thoughts or utterances standing in certain relations with other thoughts, stimuli, and responses.

The son of a socialist, Wilfrid Sellars was involved in left-wing politics.

Wilfrid Sellars campaigned for the socialist candidate Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of America.

Wilfrid Sellars's work has been drawn upon in feminist standpoint theory, for example in the work of Quill Kukla.