Wilfrid Sellars taught at the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and the University of Pittsburgh. The son of the American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, he won early fame at Minnesota as the coeditor of two volumes, one on logical analysis, the other on ethical theory, that introduced a generation of American students to the problems and issues of analytic philosophy. Readings in Philosophical Analysis (1949) was immediately adopted as the major textbook on analytic philosophy used in American colleges and universities, and his Readings in Ethical Theory (1952) was equally influential. E. W. Hall, reviewing the first edition for Ethics, declared that "This reviewer finds the volume intellectually exciting. . . . This result was achieved by a rigorous restriction in the range of material used and in a happy and entirely rational collection of it. The selections are uniformly high level: they reveal competent ethicists at work, writing for philosophically literate readers."
Sellars's early articles, influenced by the logical atomism of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (see also Vol. 5), reveal an inquisitive metaphysician who was also a careful student of the great figures in the history of philosophy. As Sellars matured, his work took a turn in the direction of Immanuel Kant and C. S. Peirce. From Kant he derived his sense of the role of conceptual structure---in the contemporary term, language---in shaping experience, so that there is no absolute given. From Peirce he gained insight into the normative aspect of all beliefs, including science. However, Sellars did not merely follow his sources. A profoundly original metaphysician, he transformed all these conceptions in the articulation of a philosophical system distinctively his own. His major book, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1968), received great acclaim. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement noted: "Although Professor Sellar's philosophical writings make di