Wilfrid Stalker Sellars Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Wilfrid Stalker Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars was an original and profound systematic philosopher who exercised a huge, though often indirect, influence on late-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. A founding editor of the first American journal of analytic philosophy and the editor of two seminal collections of essays, Sellars is known principally for his development of an antifoundationalist epistemology in response to what he attacked as the "myth of the given," his distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image," his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical ones, his tough-minded scientific realism, and his rich interpretations of historical figures in philosophy. He can also lay claim to the first explicit formulation of a functionalist treatment of intentional states; an early recognition of the "hard problem" of sensory consciousness, as well as a distinctive solution to it; and a thoroughgoing nominalism. Sellars is, however, a "philosopher's philosopher": his essays are complex and difficult, each revealing only a part of the system from which they draw their power and motivation.

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