Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars (b. 1912–d. 1989) did some of the most interesting and challenging work in Western philosophy in the 20th century. At a time when most philosophers were moving toward increasingly narrow specialization in their scholarship, he produced a large corpus that was both systematic and extensive in scope. Sellars is also a difficult philosopher to read, however. “I revise my papers until only I can understand them,” he is rumored to have said, “and then I revise them once more.” His prose is both idiosyncratic and ambitious, striking out in novel directions while striving to address the concerns of the past on every page. This article strives to address his most significant contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Most of the details of his work in the history of philosophy, particularly his work on Kant, are passed over. Wherever possible, original dates and sources of publication are included to give the reader a sense of the progression of Sellars’s work, but nearly all of these papers are included in one or more of the anthologies listed.