1880 – 1973
Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) was an American philosopher at the University of Michigan and a founding figure of Critical Realism, the view that perception provides indirect but genuine knowledge of an external world. He developed an evolutionary and materialist naturalism that treated mind as an emergent property of organized matter, anticipating later physicalist positions. He is also notable as the father of Wilfrid Sellars, whose work in analytic philosophy extended several of his concerns.
Co-authored 'Essays in Critical Realism' (1920), defining the American Critical Realist movement
Developed evolutionary naturalism, grounding mind and value in the natural order without reductive eliminativism
Argued for physical realism: the external world is real and causally efficacious, though not directly perceived
Distinguished epistemic from ontological reduction in theories of meaning and perception
Authored 'The Philosophy of Physical Realism' (1932), a systematic defense of materialist ontology