Jay Rosenberg (original) (raw)

### Jay Rosenberg

I first met Sellars in 1963, when I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh to begin my doctoral studies. Sellars himself had just come to Pittsburgh from Yale, along with Nuel Belnap and Jerome Schneewind -- Alan Anderson would follow in 1964 -- and with Kurt Baier, Adolph Grunbaum, and Nicholas Rescher already in residence, the Pittsburgh philosophy department was just coming into its full flourishing.

As luck would have it, this exceptionally gifted faculty found itself confronted in the early and mid-sixties by an unusually talented group of doctoral students, including, besides myself, Brian Skyrms, Ernest Sosa, Bas van Fraassen, Michael Dunn, Richard Burian, Louis Goble, Paul Churchland, and Patricia Smith (later Churchland). This group supplied the core membership for what can be described as an extraordinary continuing seminar - offered from trimester to trimester, to be sure, under nominally different titles, course numbers, and descriptions -- whose shifting topics were determined primarily by the philosophical problems that happened to have engaged the attention of its instructor, Wilfrid Sellars. Life in a Sellars seminar was both stimulating and stressful. Apart from delivering an opening lecture each trimester, with which he brilliantly introduced the next set of problems in their historical and dialectical contexts, Sellars' typical style was not so much to teach us as to help us to teach one another. Each session consequently saw a different student in the "hot seat", responsible for presenting and commenting on some classical or contemporary work, with Sellars presiding socratically over the ensuing, consistently vigorous, philosophical debates, goading and guiding us with pointed questions and brief penetrating remarks to new insights and understanding.

The great exception was the famous Kant course. Here Sellars indeed lectured, lucidly, with great animation and elan - and with pictures! Beginning as a simple circular mind, from week to week the synthetic unity of experience came graphically to life on the chalkboard as, step-by-step, the contributions of sensibility, the forms of outer and inner sense, the productive and reproductive imagination, the Categories, and even the transcendental unity of apperception successively found their places in a series of increasingly intricate and wonderfully enlightening diagrams.

Sellars' own philosophical works were never on the reading list, but if you asked him about his personal views on some issue, you were promptly referred to one of his many essays for your answer. What happened next was utterly predictable. The text indeed answered your original question - but you found yourself with three or four new ones, and when you asked Sellars about them, he straightaway happily referred you to another three or four of his essays. The options quickly became clear; surrender immediately, or read them all. I have never regretted my own choice.