Because he never wrote a major work summarizing his system, readers must piece it together from his articles. Consequently, many of his ideas have entered broad circulation not directly from his own work but through the more easily accessible writings of his students and colleagues. Sellars was a captivating lecturer and teacher, and many of his early advocates were students or colleagues who had a significant opportunity to listen and talk to him. After a lull around the time of his death in 1989, interest in his work has been renewed owing to a better understanding of the importance of his philosophical contributions.
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was born on 20 May 1912 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first child of the University of Michigan philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leader of the Critical Realists, and Helen Maud Stalker Sellars; both parents were Canadian immigrants. Sellars's sister, Cecily, was born in 1913. Sellars discusses his father's work in only one essay, but he employed the idiom of analytic philosophy to argue positions that his father would, in most cases, have found congenial.
As a boy, Sellars established a lifelong pattern of keeping to himself and not making friends easily.
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