Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars contributed two papers that were dedicated to his father, Roy Wood, known as an eminent initiator of Critical Realism movement in the US. In one of the two publications, Wilfrid wrote the following lines: “there are…encouraging signs that the history of philosophy, even American philosophy, is beginning to re-assume its rightful place in the philosophical enterprise and, in particular, that the history of American realistic movement will not remain ignored.” To a reader of Wilfrid Sellars, this remark is intriguing enough. Those who grapple with Sellars’s philosophy, critical and sympathetic alike, tend to approach it from a Kantian perspective. However, when it is decoupled with the exegetical platform of American Realism, this tendency, though legitimate in itself, might turn out to lead us into an inescapable blind spot. As a glance at the main tenets of American Realists will reveal, Wilfrid Sellars was not only a Kantian philosopher who tries to avoid the myth of the given, but also a philosopher of American Realism who tries to find out “the dimension of givenness that is not in dispute.” In this talk, I’ll focus on the principal ideas of American Realism expounded by Roy Wood, and as the next step, I’ll try to delineate a route that extends from Sellars pére to Sellars fils as a philosophical heir of American Realism.