Sellars myth of the given

First published Sat Feb 22, 1997; substantive revision Mon Jun 8, 2009

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (b. 1912, d. 1989) was a profoundly creative and synthetic thinker whose work both as a systematic philosopher and as an influential editor helped set and shape the Anglo-American philosophical agenda for over four decades. Sellars is perhaps best known for his classic 1956 essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, a comprehensive and sophisticated critique of “the myth of the given” which played a major role in the postwar deconstruction of Cartesianism, but his published corpus of three books and more than one hundred essays includes numerous original contributions to ontology, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, language, and mind, as well as sensitive historical and exegetical studies.

1. Sellars' Life and Career

• 1912, born May 20 in Ann Arbor, MI
• 1933, receives A.B. at the University of Michigan
• 1934, receives A.M. at the University of Buffalo, NY, enters Oriel College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar
• 1936, receives B.
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  Autobiographical Reflections

  Wilfrid Sellars

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  Published in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1975).

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        One day in the late 1940s, Robert Turnbull and I drove to the Minneapolis airport to meet Rudolf Carnap, who was coming to speak to the graduate philosophy club and to visit his good friend Herbert Feigl. At the time, I was discussing his Logische Aufbau in my seminar in Philosophical Analysis, and we had scarcely settled in the car for the return journey when I began to bombard my captive audience with questions. I have long since forgotten the detail of what I was after, but I vividly remember that his first reaction was to expostulate, "But that book was written by my grandfather!" The aptness of this remark strikes me anew as I attempt to reconstruct, in outline, the philosopher stages which preceded me-here-now. I am struck by major continuities which, like shared traits of character, run throughout the series. Othe

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  Wilfrid Sellars

  1. Life

  Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 20 May 1912, to Roy Wood and Helen Stalker Sellars. His father was a significant philosopher in his own right, a professor at the University of Michigan and a founder of American Critical Realism. Wilfrid’s childhood in Ann Arbor was interrupted for two years when he was 9: the family spent a year in New England, the summer at Oxford, and the subsequent year in Paris, where Wilfrid attended the Lycée Montaigne. Returning to Ann Arbor, Sellars then attended the high school run by the University’s School of Education, where he particularly enjoyed mathematics. Following his graduation in 1929, the family returned to Paris. Sellars entered the Lycée Louis le Grand, where philosophy was in the curriculum and Marxism was in the air. Not having discussed philosophy previously with his father, he began in philosophy as a French Marxist, although his father’s influence soon took precedence. (For a partial account of their philosophical connections, see F. Gironi 2017, 201