Johanna Seibt

When we commemorate a person we recall the physical and intellectual acme of a life, the core of a doctrine, the psychological center of influence and appeal. I want to supply here three observations that might seem marginal to the manifest image of Wilfrid Sellars, created by those who were close to him or his thought, but which point toward the suggestion that even the marginalia of a person partake of the essential personhood.

Being the last of his doctoral students, I remember Wilfrid Sellars during his last four years, a time when he fought physical feableness with a stiff fiery commitment to teaching and writing philosophy. [Johanna was the last philosopher to interact with Wilfrid -- she came to our home in Feb. 89 and spent two hours talking about her dissertation with Wilfrid -- (ed.)] It took him several painful minutes to walk the 10 ft. distance from his office to the classroom next door, where he would then give a long, lively, concentrated lecture, his mind thriving even while his body was pretty much confined to the chair. Shortly before my prospectus examination, he suffered a serious fall, yet he appeared at the meeting, in a wheel chair. Given the severe physical constraints, his style of philosophical interaction had the puzzling grandeur of a minimalistic sketch, with all nonessentail expressions eliminated.

Often, in conversation, he would lead me with the simple repetition of a "No, Go on." through several reformulations of a critical question until I despaired and in self-contempt offered the most outrageous and untenable position, which he then met with an innocently surprised "Of course."

It took me some time to realize the significance of this procedure. The centerpiece of Sellars' philosophical be/quest is nothing less than the first and only consistent naturalist-nominalist system ever developed. But there is an equally unique, albeit less obvious, methodological legacy of his writings. Evolving in a complicated dialectic between 'no' and 'of course', Sellarsian answers undercut and sidestep established dichotomies. Instead of adopting or simply combining perspectives, Sellars always aimed for a 'third way' resulting from a mediation of different philosophical intuitions. This approach was motivated by a conception of philosophical inquiry as both profound and virtuous. It does not suffice in this philosophy to simply show that a certain position has gone wrong, one must also show why it could ever appear to be right. Sellars' unswerving attempt "to trace the error back to its roots, and show why those who defend it have been led to speak as they do . . ." (SPR 282) demonstrates genuine respect for his interlocutors and deserves as much admiration from us as the positively articulated and elaborated content of his philosophy.

'Sellarsians' are those who think it a deplorable (or even embarrassing) contingency within academe that Wilfrid Sellars throughout his lifetime never quite dominated centerstage in American philosophy. But there is an increasing interest in Sellars' philosophy within European outskirts of the analytical community. Partly this is due to the fact that Sellars, more than any other recent analytical philosopher, assigned particular importance to historical investigations; partly, young European philosophers are attracted by the systematic sensitivity of Sellars' work. More than any other recent analytical philosopher, Sellars has consistently pursued the program of a comprehensive approach, casually announced very early in his career: "analysis without synopsis must be blind" (Time and the World Order 527). The committment carried by this brief enunciation is nevertheless powerful, and assures his continual presence within the philosophical tradition.

Marginalia matter. They indicate philosophical temperment. As much as I learned from the central content of Wilfrid's writings, I am equally deeply affected by the attitude of thought he stood for. He has provided a roadmap and a role-model for those who are eager to explore philosophical problems beneath the surface of classical oppositions and preconceptions, and those who are disenchanted by uninformed piecemeal analysis, submissive scholarship, and flamboyant rhetoric. In his last philosophical conversation a few months before his death, Wilfrid and I discussed kind-instance relationships. Wilfrid himself has left us no more and no less than an instance of a new kind of philosophy: both analytic and synoptic, aimed at an integral understanding of a world common to scientists and people.