Wilfrid Sellars 1912 – 1989
Wilfrid Sellars was an American philosopher and one of the most influential analytic thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. His seminal essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind dismantled what he called the Myth of the Given, the supposition that knowledge can be founded on a stratum of pre-conceptual experience, and argued that knowing is essentially a matter of placing a state in the logical space of reasons. He developed an ambitious naturalist metaphysics that distinguishes the manifest and scientific images of the world. He held chairs at Yale and Pittsburgh.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Wilfrid Sellars:
“In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons.”
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Attributed to Wilfrid Sellars:
“The Myth of the Given is the idea that there is a stratum of empirical knowledge that owes nothing to other beliefs.”
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Attributed to Wilfrid Sellars:
“Science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”
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Attributed to Wilfrid Sellars:
“Philosophy in an important sense has no special subject-matter; if philosophers do specialize, it is in seeing things together.”
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Attributed to Wilfrid Sellars:
“The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”