Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars | |
|---|---|
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophers |
| School | Analytic |
Main interests | Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Meaning, Pragmatism, History of philosophy |
Notable ideas | Myth of the Given, Behaviourism, Psychological nominalism |
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 - July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the noted Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars. Wilfrid was educated at Michigan, the University of Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh, whose philosophy department became, under his leadership, among the best in the world.
Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. He was perhaps the first philosopher to combine effectively elements of American Pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. He worked on a broad range of topics in both philosophy and its history. Sellars's writings reputedly make for hard reading, perhaps because of his insistence on writing for the ages. He deemed the history of philosophy to be the lingua franca of philosophy; hence his writings engaged not only with the philosophy of his time, but also with that of the entire past.
Robert Brandom named Sellars and Willard van Orman Quine as the two most profound and important philosophers of their generation. The work of Sellars is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the "Pittsburgh School", whose members include Brandom, John McDowell, John Haugeland, and James Conant, among others. If one were to attempt to delineate Sellars' influences, one would notice that they span from left-leaning deconstructivists led by Richard Rorty and his students David Rosenthal, Laurence BonJour, and Brandom, to the work of Hector-Neri Castaneda, Bruce Aune, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Andrew Chrucky, Jeffrey Sicha, Pedro Amaral, Thomas Vinci, Willem de Vries, and Timm Triplett, among others.
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
Sellars' most famous work is the lengthy and difficult paper, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, a sustained discussion of what he called "The Myth of the Given," which, roughly, consists in the claim, central to both phenomenology and sense-data theories of knowledge, that we can know things about our perceptual experiences independently of and in some important sense prior to the conceptual apparatus which we use to perceive objects. Sellars targets several theories at once, especially C.I. Lewis' Kantian pragmatism and Rudolf Carnap's positivism. Sellars then goes on to construct "The Myth of Jones," a philosophical parable to explain how thoughts, intelligent action, and even subjective inner experience can be attributed to people within a strict behaviorist worldview. Sellars calls his fictional tribe "Ryleans," named after Gilbert Ryle, whose The Concept of Mind he specifically wanted to address. Sellars' idea of "myth," heavily influenced by Ernst Cassirer is by no means a necessarily negative one; a myth is something that can be useful or otherwise, rather than true or false. One of Sellars' biggest goals, which his later work described as Kantian, was reconciling the conceptual behavior of the "space of reasons" with the concept of a subjective sense experience. Some think this approach blurs the received empirical distinction between knower and known, subject and object, as well as entailing "linguistic idealism."
Sellars' Problematic
In his Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars makes a profound distinction between the "manifest image", and the "scientific image". However, the demarcation is not without some problems. It is not entirely clear that the manifest image is meant to be a reconstruction of a common sense perspective. While it may be hypothesized that the manifest image describes the way the world stands according to the language we ordinarily use in interacting with it (which includes, for example, intentions, thoughts, and appearances), the scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences, including notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces, this does not entail that the manifest and scientific images are incompatible in all respects. In fact, since the manifest image inludes the activity of prescribing morality, and the scientific image is not concerned with this, in this respect the two images are complementary.
Sellars' alleged problematic, that is, the exposed debate between those asserting the primacy of the manifest image versus those asserting that of the scientific image -- though it illuminates and situates many previous philosophical arguments, and grounds further discussion of these images and their relative merits -- requires a full assertion in which respects the manifest and scientific images are claimed to have primacy.
Sellars himself, it should be noted, asserted the primacy of the scientific image only in respect to empirical descriptions and explanations. The preference of, among others, Dennett who, while maintaining the usefulness of the manifest image, fundamentally presupposes the primacy of the scientific image in a respect which may be compatible with Sellars. Other philosophers, Heidegger for example, assert that the manifest image is prior to the scientific image in some respect, or at least that the scientific image is fundamentally flawed in some respect. (Heidegger asserted that science is essentially "enframing.")
Contributions
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, 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.
(2) corresponds in part to the Sellarsian distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image.
Prominent students of Sellars include Hector-Neri Castaneda, Paul Churchland, and Jay Rosenberg.
The Incompatible Food Triad puzzle has been attributed to Sellars.
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Wilfrid Sellars -- Jay Rosenberg.
- Wilfrid Sellars web site. Includes complete bibliography of his writings, some readable online, and a list of the Ph.Ds he supervised.
- Autobiographical Reflections.
- Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind: Wilfrid Sellars -- Christopher Gauker.