ABSTRACT
Wilfrid Sellars was a highly original systematic philosopher of the past century, and for this reason alone has a unique place in contemporary philosophy. In his philosophy he drew on various historical ideas and did not confine himself to a particular movement or approach. However, the most natural setting of his views is the analytic tradition in philosophy, which provides an illuminating framework for understanding those views and seeing them in proper perspective. The paper makes an attempt to justify this approach by putting together various details from Sellars’s life that provide a glimpse into his exposure to different facets of analytic philosophy and his role in shaping it. Subsequently, an account of the Sellarsian conception of philosophy, and the sense in which it embodies characteristically analytical ideas, is provided. In conclusion, it is claimed that Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition is rather unique. Though he was tempted in his early writings to embrace a narrowly critical and unsystematic approach to philosophical questions, as well as to confine philosophy to the formal theory of languages, he later changed his metaphilosophical views and consistently defended during his middle and later period a systematic conception of philosophy, grounded on the holistic analysis of our discourses and their structures, but having as its ultimate aim a unified and comprehensive synthesis of our images of the world.
