Roy Wood Sellars

From Philosopedia

Sellars, Roy Wood (1880 - 5 September 1973)

Sellars was born in Seaforth, Ontario, in 1880, the second son of Ford Wylis and Mary Stalker Sellars. The Sellars came originally from the Glasgow region of Scotland, migrating first to Nova Scotia and then to Upper Canada (Ontario). They married into the distinguished Wood family.

His Youth

W. Preston Warren of Bucknell University wrote about Sellars in the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography.

Sellars grew up in rural Pinnebog with much outdoor life: skating, swimming, playing baseball and tending the garden. There were Norwegian, Anglo-Canadian and French Canadian boys, and he found that It was a rather egalitarian situation. . . . Religious differences were taken for granted and ignored." A two-culture background disposed him to be international in outlook.

Although he had friends in the village and countryside, he had no intellectual competitors. He went to the village school; and on completion of the eight grades at Pinnebog, he was sent to the Ferris Institute at Big Rapids to prepare him for the university. "There, he said, "I began to stand out and gained the friendship of both Mr. and Mrs. Ferris. W. D. Henderson, his teacher in physics and chemistry, once visited Sellars's home and saw his father's library. "Now I know," he said, "why Sellars has stood out."

The Ferrises in turn gave Sellars the run of their private library. Here he found and read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, following this later with Morris’s News from Nowhere and John Ball’s Dream. The result was that he developed a critical attitude toward nation-states and wars. "The Spanish-American War was on," he said, "and I became skeptical of it. . . . I remember that some of the students drilled, but I did not."

A year at the Ferris Institute prepared him for the university, but he taught in a rural one-room school for a year - all eight grades - and had more pupils than usual pass the county examinations. He himself passed an examination for a first-class lifetime teaching certificate. Earning twenty-eight dollars a month, he saved most of it.

The College Years

Sellars entered the University of Michigan in 1899, washing dishes for his board during his first year, then with his brother, cooking his own meals. He states that he was not well prepared for the university, yet his selection of courses threw him in with the class ahead of him. Still, he says, he "made a go of it," so much so indeed that on graduation his class voted him one of the two most scholarly of its members. This opinion was evidently shared by Professor Wenley of the philosophy department, who recommended him for a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, then invited him back to teach at Michigan while he himself was on sabbatical leave. In 1904 he was offered a teaching fellowship in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin.

The academic year of 1909-1910 Sellars spent in Europe. Sellars discussed with Bergson the possibility of a naturalistic, emergent type of evolution. But Bergson referred him to the scientifically trained vitalist, Hans Driesch, with whom he then studied in Heidelberg. His recollections of Driesch are not indicated in his records, but he did have personal discussions with him and Driesch pointed him to relevant specifics in physiology.

Sellars returned to teaching with a notable course in the philosophy of science. "We sometimes used Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism but also used Huxley, Mach, Poincare, and Pearson," Sellars recalled. Many of his students were graduate students in physics, chemistry, and biology.

His Writing

Three important developments had meanwhile occurred. In 1911 Sellars married his cousin, Helen Maud Stalker, an intelligent and beautiful woman who was a great helpmate until her death in 1962. In the early years of their marriage, Helen translated Bougle's Evolution of Values, for which Roy wrote a preface. In 1912 and I913 their two children were born: Wilfrid, who was to become a most eminent philosopher, and Cecily who became a minister's wife and a psychologist.

His Next Step in Religion (1918) rejected H. G. Wells’s God as well as the Christian: “I challenge any one to develop a really tenable system of theology,” to which he added that he wanted to see a “human faith” with “no tottering creed to sustain.”

Sellars wrote Evolutionary Naturalism (1922), Religion Coming of Age (1928), signed Humanist Manifesto I in 1933, The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932), "Religious Humanism" in The New Humanist (May-June 1933), and "In Defense of the Manifesto" in The New Humanist (May-June 1933).

In the 1950s, Sellars reviewed books for The Humanist, was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York, and was once an official of the American Humanist Association.

What Is Humanism?

Expanding on his ideas concerning humanism, Sellars in 1956 wrote about humanism to Warren Allen Smith:

The direction to be taken in the use of the term humanism, according to my way of thinking, is along naturalistic and empirical lines. It concerns itself with the achievement of human values and with the purposes and endeavors which give meaning to human life. Meaning is embedded in activities which give lasting satisfaction and a retrospective justifiability. And these, so far as I can see, are sufficient unto themselves and require no supernatural framework. Such an added framework strikes me as essentially traditional in character and of the stuff of which mythology is made. I prefer to speak of naturalistic humanism rather than of scientific humanism. This is, of course, a minor point. The term scientific calls up, in my mind, the ways of testing knowledge about ourselves and the world. And so far as that goes it is all to the good. But life is more than knowledge. It is an affair of imagination and values as well, of finding out what is good and beautiful and worth while. In naturalistic humanism we have the meeting-point of philosophy and religion in that both concern themselves with the interpreting of human life, though their historical genius has been different. On the whole, religions have taken the path of special revelations and sacred literature. All this immersed in ritual and liturgy. Philosophy has emphasized thought and clarification. This element has not been absent from past religion but it has been used dependently and subordinately. The humanist feels that it is both the most courageous and the wisest thing to face up to the human situation as the sciences have disclosed it and to aim at enriching human life in its various dimensions, social, familial, political, and artistic, to mention but a few of those dimensions. He takes it that the meaning of life can be spelled out in this frame which, after all, has always been with us, though under some condemnation to the mysteries held by faith. The transition will not be easy for many, for the rhetoric and mental pictures involved will be different. As I see it, it will be an affair of gradual shifting of perspective and emphasis. It is my conviction that it will be better for man when he recognizes and admits his actual status and standing as a creature of this planet and determiner of his own destiny. The humanist does not regard himself as romantic when he cherishes the hope that, out of this recognition, there will come an enforcement of the ideals of mutual understanding and fellowship in both their personal and their institutional forms. And, in these days, the debate will be a worldwide affair.

His son, Wilfrid Sellars, is a noted philosopher whose Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) is a study in analytic philosophy. He attacked the “myth of the given” in empiricism and helped turn analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists. The very idea of “epistemology” was, in fact, questioned. A 1997 edition includes an introduction by Richard Rorty.

His Influence

W. Preston Warren of Bucknell University wrote in Roy Wood Sellers (1975) an assessment of Sellars's religious views, part of which is as follows:

What, if anything, has reformed materialism to offer in religion? Professor Sellars has written extensively on religion, not always on the basis of reformed materialism, yet always on the basis of a cultural naturalism. Religion he found to be a function of the precariousness of the human situation, with its diverse forms as expressions of diverse types of culture. Historical religions are prescientific and mythological in their explanations. But religion itself is concerned with man's life, in view of the far-flung nature of things. It is therefore a natural and exceedingly important ingredient of human existence—despite its unnaturalistic forms. It is man's sense of cosmic citizenship in the light of his informed or uninformed thinking about the order of things.

From the humanistic standpoint, Sellars has been a leader. His Next Step in Religion (1918) was a pioneer American work in this field and was rated by the New York critic, James G. Hunecker, as one of the two most notable books of that year. (Conrad's Arrow of Gold was the other.) And the reviewer in the Old Orchard News wrote: "Perhaps no bigger book in point of view of usefulness to the human race has appeared in many moons than The Next Step in Religion.

In 1928 Sellars published Religion Coming of Age and was soon afterwards selected to draft the Humanist Manifesto. Published in the New Humanist (1933), the Manifesto was signed by some thirty humanists. Sellars both preceded and followed the publication of the Manifesto with a number of brief articles in clarification of humanism as a religion. Then, in the 1940's, he was invited to contribute chapters to Religious Liberals Reply and Religion in the Twentieth Century. The outcome was two papers: "Accept the Universe as a Going Concern" (1947) and "Naturalistic Humanism" (1948). A significant addition to these writings came in the late 1960's in a chapter on "Religious Existentialism" in Reflections on American Philosophy from Within. Other unpublished papers have been compiled by Professor Sellars himself for a final rounding out of his thought.

Sellers’ philosophy taken overall is a philosophy of the human scene in its cosmic context. He writes:

I see this little planet spinning in space and marvel at its history. This is not a story-book tale but one of struggle and tragedy and accomplishment. Stubbornness mixed with kindliness will achieve much but intelligence must be added. Out of these ingredients should come wisdom. Thus I triangulate and extrapolate. It is obvious that I am concerned with participative democracy in the masses, and with the growth of international institutions. Patriotism is not enough. There must be resolutions of conflicts. And this is made possible by some openness of mind and by some recognition that it is tactically wise to agree to disagree, and wait on time.