Wilfrid S. Sellars (1912-1989) was a major American philosopher who was active in the middle part of the 20th century. His father was the prominent Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars. Wilfrid Sellars's family traveled in Europe during his childhood and youth and he attended educational institutions in France and in Germany. He attended the University of Michigan, receiving an A.B. degree in 1933. He then attended the University of Buffalo, located in Buffalo, New York, from which he obtained an AM in 1934. He then traveled to England, where as a Rhodes Scholar he enrolled at Oriel College, Oxford. He earned a BA from Oriel in 1936 and an MA in 1940. In 1938 Sellars took up his first academic post as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. Sellars served in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war, in 1946, he moved to the University of Minnesota, as an assistant professor of Philosophy. At Minnesota he established a productive professional relationship with Herbert Feigl, working with him at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. In 1950 the two of them founded Philosophical Studies, a forum for publishing articles and books in the new sub-discipline of analytic philosophy, and were co-editors of the early volumes. In 1956 Sellars, while at the University of London as a Special Lecturer, delivered one of his most important papers. This was later published as "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." In 1958 Sellars became a Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. In 1963 Sellars moved to the University of Pittsburgh where he became the University Professor of Philosophy. Sellars remained at the University of Pittsburgh for the remainder of his active professional life. Sellars delivered lectures in distinguished lecture series such as the John Locke Lectures Series of Oxford University. This lecture series was subsequently published as Science and Metaphysics. Other important lecture series include the Matchette Foundation lectures of 1971, given at the University of Texas and later published as "The Structure of Knowledge"; the 1973 John Dewey Lectures of the University of Chicago, later published as "Naturalism and Ontology", and the 1977 Paul Carus Lectures which were later published as "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process". Sellars was renowned as a teacher and had profound influence on many students, both undergraduate and graduate, during his teaching career. His teaching style was lively and effective and he was able to communicate core ideas in philosophy in a clear and profound way. Some of the students affected by Sellars' teaching went on to become very prominent philosophers themselves. Among these are Pedro Amaral, Bruce Aune, Robert Brandom, Hector Neri Castaneda, Paul Churchland, James Conant, John McDowell, Willem De Vries, Richard Rorty, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Jeffrey Sicha, Tim Triplett, and Bas Van Fraassen.
From the description of Papers of Wilfrid S. Sellars, 1899-1990. (University of Pittsburgh). WorldCat record id: 173846248
