Roy Wood Sellars (July 9, 1880,

Seaforth, Ontario Seaforth (2021 population: 2,673) is a Southern Ontario community in the municipality of Huron East, in Huron County, Ontario, Canada. History Originally known as ''Four Corners'' and ''Steene's Corners'' after an early settler, much of the ...

– September 5, 1973,

Ann Arbor, Michigan Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851. It is the principal city of the Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all ...

) was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic

emergent evolution Emergent evolution is the hypothesis that, in the course of evolution, some entirely new properties, such as mind and consciousness, appear at certain critical points, usually because of an unpredictable rearrangement of the already existing entiti ...

(which he called evolutionary naturalism). Sellars received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

, where he taught for over 40 years. He is the father of

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father ...

. In his 1969 book ''Reflections on American Philosophy From Within'' he described his views on

materialism Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialis ...

as evolutionary materialism, an extension to his 1922 groundbreaking book ''Evolutionary Naturalism''. He helped draft the

Humanist Manifesto ''Humanist Manifesto'' is the title of three manifestos laying out a humanist worldview. They are the original '' Humanist Manifesto'' (1933, often referred to as Humanist Manifesto I), the ''Humanist Manifesto II'' (1973), and ''Humanism and I ...

in 1933 and also signed the

Humanist Manifesto II ''Humanist Manifesto II'', written in 1973 by humanists Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, was an update to the previous ''Humanist Manifesto'' published in 1933, and the second entry in the '' Humanist Manifesto'' series. It begins with a state ...

in 1973. Sellars was a supporter of

socialism Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes th ...

, saying that socialism was a democratic conception of economic organisation which "will give the maximum possible at any one time of justice and liberty".

References

External links

Biography
at Notable American Unitarians
Biography mirror

*
Roy Wood Sellars 1880–1973
by William K. Frankena, ''Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association'', Vol. 47, 1973–74, pp. 230–32. * * 1880 births 1973 deaths American humanists 20th-century American philosophers University of Michigan faculty University of Michigan alumni American socialists {{US-philosopher-stub

See also

References

External links