Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (; May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism[Willem deVries, 2014. " Wilfrid Sellars," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aug. 11,] who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Life and career
His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century.
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.
[Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: ] 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 foundationalism epistemology—the "Myth of the Given" as he called it.
Philosophical work
Sellars coined certain now-common idioms in philosophy, such as the "space of reasons". This idiom refers to two things. It:
-
Describes the conceptual and behavioral web of language that humans use to get intelligently around their world,
-
Denotes the fact that talk of reasons, epistemic justification, and intention is not the same as, and cannot necessarily be mapped onto, talk of causes and effects in the sense that physical science speaks of them.
Note: (2) corresponds in part to the distinction Sellars makes between the manifest image and the scientific image.
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"
Sellars's most famous work is "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956).
In it, he criticizes the view that knowledge of what we perceive can be independent of the conceptual processes which result in perception. He named this "
The Myth of the Given," attributing it to
sense-data theories of knowledge.
The work targets several theories at once, especially C. I. Lewis' Kantian pragmatism and Rudolf Carnap's positivism. He draws out "The Myth of Jones," to defend the possibility of a strict behaviorist world-view. The parable explains how thoughts, intelligent action, and even subjective inner experience can be attributed to people within a scientific model. Sellars used a fictional tribe, the "Ryleans," since he wanted to address Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind.
Sellars's idea of "myth", heavily influenced by Ernst Cassirer,
"The Language of Theories"
In his paper "The Language of Theories“ (1961), Sellars introduces the concept of
Kantian empiricism.
Kantian empiricism features a distinction between (1) claims whose revision requires abandonment or modification of the system of
in terms of which they are framed (i.e., modification of the
fallible set of constitutive principles underlying knowledge, otherwise known as framework-relative
a priori truths) and (2) claims revisable on the basis of observations formulated in terms of a system of concepts which remained fixed throughout.
[
]
"Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man"
In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world. It also includes his famous quote about "the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated," being "to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term."
The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances. Sellars allows that the manifest image may be refined through 'correlational induction', but he rules out appeal to imperceptible entities.
The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences. It includes notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces.
The two images sometimes complement one another, and sometimes conflict. For example, the manifest image includes practical or moral claims, whereas the scientific image does not. There is conflict, e.g. where science tells us that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. Sellars favors a synoptic vision, wherein the scientific image takes ultimate precedence in cases of conflict, at least with respect to empirical descriptions and explanations.[Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound (2007) p.3]
"Meaning as Functional Classification"
In "Meaning as Functional Classification" (1974) Sellars elaborated upon a version of functional role semantics that he had previously defended in prior publications.[Sellars, W. (1974). Meaning as Functional Classification: A perspective on the relation of syntax to semantics. Synthese, 27(3-4), 417-437.][Sellars, W. (1954). Some reflections on language games. Philosophy of Science, 21(3), 204-228.][Sellars, W. (1950). Language, Rules and Behavior.] For 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. [Piccinini, G. (2004). Functionalism, computationalism, and mental contents. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34(3), 375-410.]
Politics
The son of a socialist,
Legacy
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.[Chauncey Maher, The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy. Routledge. 2012.] Especially Brandom introduced a Hegelianism variety of the Pittsburgh School, often called analytic Hegelianism.[Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, Harvard University Press, 2019.][deVries, Willem A. "Hegel's Revival in Analytic Philosophy". In: The Oxford Handbook of Hegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. 743–766: "Analytic philosophy is rediscovering Hegel. There a particularly strong thread of new analytic Hegelianism, sometimes called 'Pittsburgh Hegelianism' ... 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."] Sellars himself viewed his work as moving analytic philosophy from its Humeanism (i.e. logical positivist) to its Kantian phase, and Richard Rorty suggested that Brandom's work continues that movement into its Hegelian phase.
Other philosophers strongly influenced by Sellars span the full spectrum of contemporary English-speaking philosophy, from neopragmatism (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.[Rebecca Kukla, "Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge". Episteme 3(1): 80–95. 2006.]
Sellars's death in 1989 was the result of long-term alcohol use.
Bibliography
-
Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds-The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, PPPW, ed. by Jeffrey F. Sicha, (Ridgeview Publishing Co; Atascadero, CA; 1980). Contains
-
Science, Perception and Reality, SPR, (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd; London, and The Humanities Press: New York; 1963) Reissued
-
Philosophical Perspectives, PP, (Charles C. Thomas: Springfield, IL; 1967). Reprinted in two volumes, Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy and Philosophical Perspective: Metaphysics and Epistemology, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA; 1977).
-
Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. S&M, (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd; London, and The Humanities Press; New York; 1968). The 1966 John Locke Lectures. Reissued
-
Essays in Philosophy and Its History, EPH, (D. Reidel Publishing Co.; Dordrecht, Holland; 1975).
-
Naturalism and Ontology, N&O, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA: 1979). An
-
The Metaphysics of Epistemology: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Pedro Amaral, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA; 1989). Contains
-
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind EPM*, edited by Robert Brandom, (Harvard University Press.; Cambridge, Massachusetts; 1997). The (see below), lacking footnotes added in SPR, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Brandom.]
-
Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Pedro Amaral, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA: 2002). A
-
Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics: Cassirer Lecture Notes and Other Essays, edited by Jeffrey F. Sicha, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA: 2002). Contains
See also
-
American philosophy
-
Definitions of philosophy
-
List of American philosophers
-
The Myth of the Framework
-
Transcendental empiricism
Further reading
-
Dionysis Christias. Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars' Synoptic Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
-
John McDowell. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1996.
-
Richard Rorty. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1979.
External links
