Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912-1989) was an American philosopher and one of the most influential figures in analytic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. He is regarded as a leading developer of critical realism and scientific naturalism, and his work covers metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. His central aim was to reconcile everyday experience with the scientific account of the world.

The son of the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, he studied at the University of Michigan and at Oxford, where he earned an MA in 1940 as a Rhodes Scholar. During the Second World War he served in military intelligence. He then taught at Iowa, Minnesota and Yale, and from 1963 until his death at the University of Pittsburgh. He presided over the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977 and co-founded the journal Philosophical Studies.

His best-known text, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), attacks the Myth of the Given, the idea that perceptual knowledge can be immediate and independent of concepts. For Sellars, perceiving already involves a conceptual framework, and our beliefs are justified within a space of reasons rather than by causes alone. In the same work he used the parable of the Ryleans to show how thought and inner experience can be explained within a scientific model.

In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1962) he distinguished between the manifest image, made up of intentions, thoughts and the values of common sense, and the scientific image, built by the theoretical sciences. He recognised conflicts between the two and gave science priority in matters of description, yet sought room for the normative through a theory of conceptual roles passed on by language and social life. His influence reaches Robert Brandom, John McDowell and Paul Churchland, and gave rise to the so-called Pittsburgh School.