ABSTRACT
Wilfrid Sellars, born 1912, was the son of the critical realist, naturalist, and humanist Roy Wood Sellars, who taught philosophy at the University of Michigan throughout much of the twentieth century’s first half. Despite this parentage, it was not obvious that the younger Sellars would become a professional philosopher. As he recounted of his time at secondary school:
it was here that I had my first encounter with philosophy. I say ‘my first encounter’ in all seriousness for I scarcely knew that there was a subject called philosophy, let alone that there was such a subject. It had never come up as such in any conversation with my father, at least that I can remember. 1
