Philosopher
Roy Wood Sellars
Overview
Roy Wood Sellars (; July 9, 1880, Seaforth, Ontario – September 5, 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan) was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical perceptual realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic emergent evolution (which he called "evolutionary naturalism"). He was the father of Wilfrid Sellars.
Sellars received his B.A. (1903) and Ph.D. (1908/09) from the University of Michigan, where he taught philosophy for over 40 years. He also briefly studied at the Hartford Theological Seminary, the University of Paris (under Henri Bergson), and the University of Heidelberg (under Hans Driesch and Wilhelm Windelband). He made contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, and political philosophy.
In his 1969 book Reflections on American Philosophy from Within he described his views on materialism as evolutionary materialism, an extension to his 1922 book Evolutionary Naturalism.
He helped draft the Humanist Manifesto in 1933 and also signed the Humanist Manifesto II in 1973. Sellars was a supporter of socialism, saying that socialism was a democratic conception of economic organisation which "will give the maximum possible at any one time of justice and liberty".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Roy Wood Sellars
Ideas Roy Wood Sellars discusses
- Wilhelm Windelband
- Henri Bergson
- Metaphysics
- Materialism
- Political philosophy
- Socialism
- University of Michigan
- Wilfrid Sellars
- Philosophy of science
- Naturalism (philosophy)
- Religious humanism
- University of Paris
- Epistemology
- Hans Driesch
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.