WILFRID STALKER SELLARS died at his Pittsburgh home on July 2, 1989 at the age of 78. He is survived by his wife, Susanna Downey Sellars.

Professor Sellars was born in Ann Arbor on May 20, 1912 to Helen Maud (Stalker) Sellars and Roy Wood Sellars, an eminent philosopher in the Critical Realist tradition. Wilfrid Sellars was educated in the Lycee Louis le Grand, the University of Michigan (AB 1933), and the University of Buffalo (MA 1934), before going to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (Oriel College). He was awarded a BA with First Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1936 (MA 1940).

His first academic position was as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa in 1938. The war soon interrupted his academic career, and from 1943 to 1945 he saw active duty as a US Naval Reserve officer, first an Ensign and later a Lieutenant, assigned to Air Combat Intelligence, Atlantic Fleet Anti-submarine Development. In 1945-46 he was assigned to the Navy Department. In 1946 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. He was promoted to Professor at Minnesota in 1951 and chaired the Philosophy Department from 1952-59. On leave from Minnesota in 1958-59, he visited Yale, and moved there as Professor of Philosophy from 1959 until 1963. In 1963 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as University Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of the Philosophy of Science, a post held until his death. At various times after coming to Pittsburgh, Professor Sellars visited at Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Princeton, and Rockfeller. While at Minnesota he had been Special Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of London in 1956--the lectures were published as "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He gave the John Locke Lectures for 1965-66 at Oxford, the John Dewey Lectures for 1973-74 at the University of Chicago, the Paul Carus Lectures for 1977-78 at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, and the Ernst Cassirer Lectures at Yale in 1979. He served as President of the APA Eastern Division in 1970-71.

At Pittsburgh Professor Sellars became the most productive supervisor of PhD students in a department that did not lack for productive senior educators. He continued to serve as co-editor of Philosophical Studies until 1975, a job he had taken up at Minnesota in 1950.

In 1963 he published Science, Perception and Reality, a collection of his most influential earlier papers. It will be reissued soon by a new publisher. He followed with another collection, Philosophical Perspectives, in 1967, and went on to publish Science and Metaphysics in 1968, Essays in Philosophy and Its History in 1975, Naturalism and Ontology in 1980, and Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds in 1981.

Some of Professor Sellars' early papers from the late forties and early fifties are self-contained and do not depend on each other. But he was a systematic philosopher par excellence, and his mature work forms a richly interconnected whole, with philosophy of mind dependent on philosophy of science, philosophy of science on philosophy of language, philosophy of language on theory of action, and so on--a dazzling theoretical edifice. But a formidable one, too. A great many readers in the heyday of analytic philosophy were unready to digest such a large meal, and since digesting all was essential to getting the true flavor of any, the circle of Sellarsians remained relatively small. Time, and renewed tolerance for system-building, are changing this, and today one finds quite a number of philosophers in diverse traditions who share the view that Wilfrid Sellars was the deepest American philosopher of the Twentieth Century.