Gerald J. Massey

While he was alive it was my privilege to be Wilfrid Sellars' friend. Now that he is dead, it is my honor to speak at his memorial service and to try to evoke, for a few moments, the humanity of this many-sided and wonderful human being. In so doing, I am aware that I am only reminding some of you of what you know from your own acquaintance with Wilfrid. But perhaps these remarks will inform others, who knew Wilfrid less well, or who have come to know him only in recent years, of what the man was like.

Let me begin with his aloofness, which was legendary. Adjectives that might have been applied to him include the following: forbidding, distant, cold, arrogant, and even contemptuous. I myself was disposed to apply some such adjectives to Wilfrid when I first met him. The occasion was his Isenberg Lecture, delivered at Michigan State University about 1965. My then colleagues in East Lansing made the mistake of trying to talk philosophy with Wilfrid, and in particular to take issue with some of the things he had said and to criticize others. What they did not realize about Wilfrid was that, paradoxical as it may seem, philosophy was a forbidden topic. There were three subjects one could talk with Wilfrid about, indeed, that he was eager to talk about: horticulture, especially gardening; sports, especially baseball; and politics, especially if you shared his own generous liberal view of the world. Only philosophy was off limits. Although unwilling to talk philosophy with others, Wilfrid was eager to respond to questions about philosophy, whether about his own views or about philosophical matters generally. Nor was he all answers and no questions. When he respected his interlocutor he himself would pose philosophical questions. In this question-and-answer format, one could explore the world of philosophy with Wilfrid in an illuminating and engaging way. In some recent philosophical work of my own I have made use of the concept of a purely interrogative language, i.e., a language the speakers of which accomplish all their linguistic ends using interrogative force only. No doubt my experience of exploring philosophy with Wilfrid lay behind this idea.

Two anecdotes that relate to occasions when Wilfrid was interviewed by reporters will perhaps give you a sense of Wilfrid's attitude toward talking philosophy. Wilfrid seemed to take perverse delight in clamming up when interviewed. On one occasion, he was to be interviewed by a reporter from The University Times. Although forewarned that Wilfrid could be difficult to interview, this particular reporter was haughtily confident of her abilities. She had had difficult interviewees before and had managed well. Wilfrid would be no different. Well, Wilfrid was different. After a few minutes of painful silence, she fled Wilfrid's office in despair. Shortly thereafter Wilfrid emerged from his office to report triumphantly to his secretary, Mary Connor, that "She didn't get a single thing out of me."

By contrast, shortly before the 1987 Colloquium held here at Pitt to celebrate his 75th year, Wilfrid was to be interviewed by a reporter from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When alerted to the difficulty of interviewing Wilfrid, this reporter had the good sense to seek advice. She inquired of me, among others, how she might proceed. I asked her if she knew anything about gardening, sports, or politics. Happily, she did. I then suggested that she chat with Wilfrid about these topics before even broaching philosophy. I cautioned her never to try to talk philosophy with Wilfrid, but only to ask him questions, and I referred her to colleagues who would help her with what questions to ask. Judged by the excellent article that appeared in the Post-Gazette, the interview went wonderfully well. Wilfrid himself emerged from it with youthful buoyancy, exclaiming that he had thoroughly enjoyed his conversation with this young woman and remarking what a delightful and intelligent person she was.

Wilfrid could on occasion be thoughtless. And his thoughtlessness sometimes made him appear selfish or ungenerous, as when he would fail to give a holiday gift to someone to whom he should have given one. In fact, Wilfrid was unusually generous. I remember a luncheon in his club, The Pittsburgh Athletic Association, immediately after the memorial service for a departed colleague whom Wilfrid had liked and admired. Wilfrid, several other colleagues, and I proposed there and then to try to raise some money to memorialize our late colleague. Although by no means a rich man, Wilfrid sat down and wrote out a check for $1,000.00 to get the memorial fund under way. For a man of his means, this was a grand gesture, done with the style and panache that Wilfrid admired in others and liked to exhibit himself.

I think a grand gesture by the former Provost, Charles Peake, toward Wilfrid was in no small way responsible for Wilfrid's coming to Pitt. The occasion was a visit by Wilfrid to the Pitt campus when, at his initiative, he was weighing an offer to leave Yale and to come to Pitt as University Professor of Philosophy. He met with Charlie Peake in the Provost's office suite, 353 Cathedral of Learning. During this meeting Wilfrid remarked to Charlie how pleasant an office Charlie had. Without missing a beat, Charlie replied "Come to Pitt and it's yours." Wilfrid did come to Pitt and Charlie was true to his promise. Wilfrid occupied 353 Cathedral of Learning from 1963, when he joined the Pitt faculty, until his death.

To many people Wilfrid appeared to be a loner, but he evoked deep affection from his students as well as touching devotion from his secretaries. He was a sensitive and sometimes even a sentimental man. After the banquet in his honor at the 1987 Colloquium on Sellarsian Philosophy, Wilfrid could hardly keep back tears. The tears came when, on the way to the car afterwards, he told Mary Connor [his last and most devoted secretary] that it was the happiest day of his life. In the last two years of his life Wilfrid often re-lived the Colloquium. It was as if he had a video cassette recording of it in his head, which he would replay now and then, each time focusing on a different individual or a different incident. But sentimentality did not keep Wilfrid, who could be quite a tease, from teasing Mary Connor, who had arranged to have a proclamation from the Mayor of Pittsburgh presented to Wilfrid at the banquet. "All I got was a proclamation ... why didn't you get me the keys to the city?", he would say to her in mock complaint.

Wilfrid left a considerable intellectual progeny. His former students were devoted to him, just as he was devoted to them. Their sentiments are, I think, well captured in a cable which arrived yesterday [October 25, 1989] from his last doctoral student, Dionysios Anapolitanos, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Athens. Dionysios ends his communication with a Greek saying that can be translated as "May the earth that now covers him be feather light."

Those who knew Wilfrid only as the shuffling, semi-invalid of recent years might have thought that Wilfrid had been a sickly man, or one lacking in vigor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wilfrid was a vigorous and athletic man throughout his prime, which lasted most of his life. Just how vigorous he was may he inferred from this story of a sailing trip that Wilfrid and I made in the early 70's when he was about 60 years old.

Wilfrid and I drove up to Lake Erie in his vintage Sunbeam Tiger, which he dearly loved. We had intended to make an overnight sail on Lake Erie from the town of Erie to Barcelona, the first harbor in New York east of Erie, but the weather did not cooperate. When we arrived at the marina on Presque Isle, the wind, at 25-30 knots, was coming out of the east-northeast, the very direction in which Barcelona Harbor lay. Although he had spent his summers as a youngster on the Canadian shores of Lake Erie, and was a Navy veteran of World War II, Wilfrid had never before been in a sailboat. So we took my 22-foot sailboat out into the protected waters of Presque Isle Bay where we sailed idly for a half-hour so that Wilfrid could get used to the boat and the water. The wind was strong enough that even Presque Isle Bay was rough. I thought Wilfrid might be reluctant to venture out onto the open waters of Lake Erie, which were very rough indeed. So I put the following proposal to Wilfrid. We could sail in the protected waters of Presque Isle Bay for the day, sleep on the boat in the Marina that night, and sail again, perhaps out on the lake itself, the next day. Or we could go out onto Lake Erie, in which case several alternatives presented themselves. We could sail to Barcelona, as we had originally planned, but I recommended against this course because the wind was coming directly from that harbor. It would mean sailing closed-hauled in heavy weather for an entire day. The more attractive alternative was to sail west-southwest to the first port in Ohio, Conneaut Harbor. If we did this we could run with the wind directly behind us, a more comfortable and less fatiguing point of sail.

I expected Wilfrid to choose to remain in Presque Isle Bay. I even hoped that he would make this choice, because I wasn't too keen to go out on the open lake in such weather with such an inexperienced crew. But Wilfrid's crisp answer came quickly. "We came to sail," he declared, as he related his desire to sail to Conneaut. And sail we did. It is 25 statute miles between the Lighthouse on Presque Isle and the Navigation lights at the entrance to Conneaut Harbor. We covered those 25 miles in 2 1/2 hours, averaging 10 miles per hour, a speed which was more than twice the hull speed of my sailboat. This meant we were not sailing through the water but rather were surfing on top of it. Large waves, which were running 10 feet high, would curl up aft of us, and then pick us up and hurl us forward at what felt to me like breakneck speed. Wilfrid was exhilarated by the excitement and thrill of the sail. He took to the boat like a duck to water. But at one point when he was manning the tiller, he let the wind sneak behind the sail and whip the boom across the boat, a dangerous maneuver that sailors call an "uncontrolled jibe". (Perhaps Wilfrid's attention had been distracted momentarily by thoughts of pink ice cubes.) I feared that the force of the boom would yank the stays and shrouds out of their chain plates, but the rigging held good. When we got to Conneaut, we tied the boat up, went ashore to the yacht club for a martini and a steak dinner, and then returned to the boat for a good night's sleep before making an uneventful sail back to Erie the next day.

I have taken many graduate students and other young people sailing on the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, and I can report that most of them would have been worn out by sails half as demanding as the one Wilfrid and I made that day. Far from being exhausted Wilfrid was energized by its rigors. He was, as I said, a vigorous man. But what I remember most about that sail with Wilfrid was his simple declaration: "We came to sail!". It seems to me to capture his approach to life and his zest for it.

Thank you.