Roy Wood Sellars' main goals were to unite and harmonize the perspectives of science and common sense, to renew religion with the scientific developments of the day, and to popularize a scientifically based system of progressive humanist values.
Roy Wood Sellars was a member of an unprecedented generation of systematic philosophers in America. He was born in Ontario, Canada, and spent most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he continued to work into his 90s.
A fiercely independent thinker who resisted the fashions of the day to follow his own intuitions, Roy Wood Sellars believed that the philosopher should have a good background in both the history of philosophy and the sciences and be philosophically engaged with the important moral, social, and political issues of the day.
Roy Wood Sellars (July 9, 1880, Seaforth, Ontario – September 5, 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan) was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic emergent evolution (which he called evolutionary naturalism). Sellars received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he taught for over 40 years. He is the father of Wilfrid Sellars.
Roy Wood Sellars' main goals were to unite and harmonize the perspectives of science and common sense, to renew religion with the scientific developments of the day, and to popularize a scientifically based system of progressive humanist values. Sellars wrote and published articles prolifically throughout his long life. Sellars has 15 books, more than 100 articles, 14 book reviews, and various works.
He is best known for his groundbreaking theories in areas such as critical realism, evolutionary naturalism, “double knowledge,” mind-brain identity theory, and his defense of religious humanism. He was the editor-in-chief of the First Humanist Manifesto of 1933. Finally, he is the father of Wilfrid Sellars, a highly influential philosopher in his own right, and many of his views are continuous with those of his father, given the different language and emphasis of the two periods.
Roy Wood Sellars lived from 9 July 1880 to 5 September 1973. He was born in Seaforth, Ontario, the second son of Ford Wylis and Mary Stalker Sellars. His ancestors migrated from Glasgow, Scotland to Nova Scotia and later moved to Ontario. In Ontario, Sellars' family merges with the prestigious Wood family, which includes a well-known Captain from the War of 1812 (David Wood) acting commissioner of the North West Mounted Police, and Commissioner of the Canadian Yukon Territory (Zachary Taylor Wood). This made him a relative of the 12th president of the United States (Zachary Taylor). Sellars was also very proud that one of his ancestors, Lord Stanley, appeared at Bosworth Field in Shakespeare's Richard III.
Roy's father, Ford, worked as a teacher and school principal until he had to leave this profession due to health problems. Later, Ford studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and became a physician in 1882. After graduating from medical school, the Sellars family settled in Pinnebog, Michigan. Since this was a small town, Roy's youth friends were farm boys. Roy Wood Sellars was interested in swimming, baseball, and hockey in his youth and maintained his interest in sports throughout his life. His father's library was the only one in the area, and although young Roy knew little about philosophy, he read Emerson and Carlyle and had numerous discussions with his father about medicine. In this small rural community, Roy's intellectual abilities quickly distinguished him from others, and he was sent to the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids, Michigan, to prepare for his college career.
Roy entered the University of Michigan in 1899, where he cooked his own meals and washed the dishes of his lodgings. Although this young boy, who had no self-confidence due to living in a small town and rural area, thought he was unprepared for the university program, he decided to "make it happen" and was among the top two scholars in his class when he graduated.
He did extensive work in both the arts and sciences, including rhetoric and mathematics. Sellars received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1903 and attended Hartford Theological Seminary, where he studied the New Testament in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic (and read the Quran in the original). He acquired a historically and culturally based critical approach to religion and sympathy for social liberalism and humanism that remained with him throughout his life. In 1904, Professor Wenley from the Michigan Department of Philosophy offered Sellars a scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, and after working there for a while, Sellars returned to the University of Michigan to replace Professor Wenley.
During a year spent in Europe, Roy Wood Sellars studied at the Sorbonne and discussed with Henri Bergson the possibility of a naturalistic formulation of emergent evolution. Bergson also directed him to the scientist and vitalist Hans Driesch.
Some of the students who took the political philosophy course, in which Sellars discussed the issues of democracy, communism, socialism, and fascism, stated that although they expected him to be a propagandist, the course approached these issues from an academic perspective and did not carry any prejudice.